Patent ID: 7127001

Claim:
A method of characterizing one or more communication channels, comprising: receiving a set of first symbols associated with a first communication channel; receiving a set of second symbols associated with a second communication channel; characterizing at least a first communication channel based on at least the set of first symbols and the set of second symbols to produce a set of first channel characteristics, wherein characterizing the first communication channel includes: performing a first correlation to produce a set of first correlations; and determining the set of first channel characteristics based on at least the set of first correlations, wherein determining the set of first channel characteristics includes determining at least a set of first pre-estimates {overscore (h)} 1 [n], wherein the set of first pre-estimates {overscore (h)} 1 [n]is determined based on the equation: h _ i ⁡ [ n ] = 1 K ⁢ p i ⁡ [ n ] , wherein p i [n]is the set of first correlations and K is a constant; and time-averaging at least one pre-estimate to produce a set of time-averaged estimates; wherein characterizing one or more communication channels is performed without a matrix inversion; wherein at least the first communication channel is based on a constant-modulus technique.