Patent ID: 8331249

Claim:
A method of operating a device, the method comprising: receiving a signal on a set of communications resources; identifying a first subset of the set of communications resources on which a signal of interest was communicated, wherein the identifying includes selecting, as said first subset, resources corresponding to a device identifier of a peer to peer communications device implementing said method; determining, based on the received energy corresponding to individual sub-portions of said first subset of the set of communications resources, if one or more sub-portions of the received signal of interest are reliable by: generating an estimate of the average power per signal sub-portion corresponding to the first subset of communications resources; and determining that sub-portions having a sub-portion signal power within a threshold range above and below said average power are reliable; and recovering, from the sub-portions of the received signal of interest which are determined to be reliable, a communicated control signal by performing a positional decoding operation based on selectively excluding information indicating a position of at least one tone-symbol in said first subset which is not determined to be reliable.