Patent ID: 7519125

Claim:
A method performed by a multicarrier receiver to receive an OFDM communication signal comprising a plurality of subcarriers through a plurality of antennas, the method comprising: generating, in a preliminary spatial correlator, a preliminary spatial correlation matrix for each active subcarrier by performing a symbol-by-symbol correlation on frequency-domain samples for each of the active subcarriers and averaging correlation outputs over a plurality of symbols; generating, in a channel length estimator, a channel length estimate from a channel estimate and a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimate; generating, in a weighting values calculator, a channel length matrix from the channel length estimate by placing zeroes in non-diagonal positions, by placing ones in some diagonal positions based on the channel length estimate, and by placing zeros in other of the diagonal positions; generating, in a weighting values calculator, a weighting matrix from the channel length matrix, a modified fast Fourier transformation (FFT) matrix, and a pseudo-inverse of the modified FFT matrix; and generating, in a multiplier, final spatial correlation estimates for each active subcarrier by multiplying corresponding elements of the preliminary spatial correlation matrix by the weighting matrix.