Method and apparatus for coherent receive beamforming

A wireless communication device comprising:

• a plurality of antennas configured to receive signals;
• a plurality of phase shifters, each phase shifter configured to adjust a phase of a signal received on a corresponding antenna;
• a combiner configured to combine the signals after adjustment of a phase by the phase shifters;
• an analog-to-digital converter configured to convert the combined signal to a digital signal;
• a channel estimator configured to estimate a set of channel responses including complex channel coefficients for the plurality of antennas from a set of digital signals obtained by multiple channel observations;
• and
• a controller configured to determine a beamforming codeword for receive beamforming based on the set of channel responses and apply the beamforming codeword to a received signal on the plurality of antennas,
• wherein the received signal includes a synchronization signal and the controller is configured to use the synchronization signal in estimating the set of channel responses including the complex channel coefficients on a condition that no colliding synchronization signal is detected from neighbor cells or signal power of a synchronization signal from the neighbor cells is below a threshold.