Patent ID: 7693228

Claim:
A method comprising: separating data into multiple transmitting paths to transmit the data from one or more transmitting antennas by including an orthogonal preamble having training symbols, in which a training symbol is included in each time block of transmission for each transmitting antenna and in which a grouping of multiple time blocks from each transmitting antenna is determined by either a number of transmitting antennas or data streams utilized to send the data, wherein a preamble for each transmitting antenna is separated for transmission across the grouping of time blocks for each transmitting antenna by dividing subcarriers of the transmission into grouping of subcarrier indices; and transmitting a group of subcarrier indices in a respective time block of a grouping of time blocks for each transmitting antenna, but in which a different set of subcarrier indices are transmitted from each of the transmitting antennas in a given time block, so that a complete set of subcarrier indices, although of different preambles, are sent in each time block from all of the transmitting antennas to allow a receiver that receives all of the time blocks from all of the transmitting antennas to perform channel estimation by first obtaining an interim channel estimation value which is then operated on by a weighting matrix stored in the receiver, in which the weighting matrix has coefficients corresponding to the training symbols and the weighting matrix is quantized instead of quantizing each entry in the weighting matrix, wherein results of the weighting matrix operation on the interim channel estimation value are saturated to select a predetermined number of bits to obtain channel estimation from the training symbols.