Method and apparatus for shared parameter estimation in a generalized rake receiver

A wireless communication receiver for use in a wireless communication network base station, comprising:

• a radio front-end circuit configured to provide two or more received multipath signals comprising at least a first signal and a second signal, each of the first and second signals including possible multipath interference;
• and
• a receiver circuit configured to generate one or more combined signals from despreading the received signals of interest;
• said receiver circuit configured to calculate combining weights by:
• measuring correlations of signal impairments, each associated with the first and second signals;
• jointly estimating values of fitting parameters in response to measurements of correlations of signal impairments associated with each of the first and second signals;
• and
• estimating received signal impairment correlations for each of the first and second signals by applying the estimated values of the fitting parameters.

A method of received signal processing comprising:

• receiving a multipath signal comprising at least one high-data-rate signal and at least one low-data-rate signal;
• measuring the pilot channel associated with each received high-data-rate signal;
• computing medium response estimates for each received high-data-rate signal;
• computing measured impairment covariance matrices for each received high-data-rate signal;
• computing impairment correlation terms comprising signal interference and noise covariance matrices;
• computing estimates of fitting parameters;
• and
• constructing impairment covariance matrices for high-data-rate and/or low-data-rate signals based on the estimates of fitting parameters.