Patent ID: 8750440

Claim:
A method, comprising: at a receiver, receiving a signal comprising reference symbols that is sent over a communication channel from a transmitter to the receiver; estimating a response of the communication channel by applying one or more weighting values to a group of the reference symbols transmitted in respective time-frequency bins; computing an estimate of a noise level in the received signal based on the estimated response of the communication channel and on the same group of the reference symbols over which the response of the communication channel was estimated; computing, based on the weighting values, a noise correction factor that compensates for a deviation in the estimate of the noise level caused by estimating both the response of the communication channel and the noise level based on the same group of the reference symbols that were transmitted in the same respective time-frequency bins; correcting the estimate of the noise level by the noise correction factor; and decoding the received signal based on the corrected estimate of the noise level.