Patent ID: 7742548

Claim:
A method comprising the steps of: receiving a communication signal in a matched filter, the matched filter being configured for selecting one or more blocks from the communication signal and for filtering the blocks to obtain an output of the matched filter; providing the output of the matched filter to a frame synchronizer and to a coarse frequency estimator; obtaining substantially simultaneously a symbol boundary using the frame synchronizer and a plurality of metrics using the coarse frequency estimator, wherein each of the metric being indicative of an estimate of coarse frequency offset, wherein obtaining the plurality of metrics comprises: receiving output of the matched filter in a first memory and in a correlator; obtaining a metric by performing a sliding correlation using the correlator on a first sample obtained from the first memory and a second sample obtained from the output of the matched filter, the first and the second samples being separated from one another by a predetermined time; storing the metric in a second memory; repeating above steps for each of the samples of a block; and executing the step of receiving the samples of a following block, and obtaining the metric; accumulating the obtained metric in the second memory; and repeating the steps of executing and accumulating for a number of subsequent blocks; and selecting one of the accumulated metric from the plurality of metrics corresponding to a location indicated by the symbol boundary for obtaining an estimate of the coarse frequency offset.