Patent ID: 8238455

Claim:
A method for calculating traffic-to-pilot ratios at a wireless terminal, the method comprising: establishing a table for calculating traffic-to-pilot ratios at the wireless terminal in a communication system, with the wireless terminal having a plurality of OFDM symbols available for transmission, a subset of the OFDM symbols being used for transmitting reference signals; receiving a reference signal (RS) overhead ratio η RS and a traffic-to-pilot ratio P B,k /P RS for certain Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols at the wireless terminal, with P B,k being an Energy Per Resource Element (EPRE) power assigned on non-RS OFDM symbols, and P RS being a RS power per subcarrier; and calculating traffic-to-pilot ratios across different transmission antennas and different OFDM symbols in dependence upon the calculation table and a number of available transmission antennas in the wireless terminal.