Patent ID: 6970416

Claim:
A communication method, comprising the steps of: (a) receiving an information bearing OFDM signal at a receiver, where information in the information bearing OFDM signal is carried by each sub-carrier of a set of sub-carriers allocated to the receiver; (b) constructively combining the sub-carriers at the receiver to produce a combined signal, wherein M sub-carriers are in the set of sub-carriers and constructively combining the sub-carriers comprises the steps of: (i) sampling the information bearing OFDM signal to generate a sampled signal having a spectrum and being formed of samples; (ii) decimating the sampled signal by retaining each Mth sample and discarding each other sample to produce a decimated signal formed of M frequency scaled and frequency shifted copies of the spectrum of the sampled signal; and (iii) recovering the combined signal by accumulating the samples at a selected frequency; and (c) extracting the information from the combined signal.