A beam formation circuit and an apparatus and a method of receiving radio frequency signals making use of a smart antenna are described in which the amount of computation tasks required for the weight calculation is significantly reduced. In realizing the directivity of the smart antenna, the output signals corresponding to a plurality of sub-carriers are weighted with a common antenna weight for each of the antenna elements.

An orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receiving signal from a plurality of antenna elements having identical characteristics is supplied to an excitation weight calculating part. An excitation weight is calculated for use in controlling excitation for each antenna element and each subcarrier based on the element intervals of the antenna elements and the frequency intervals of OFDM subcarriers. A receiving signal from the antenna elements is assigned the calculated excitation weight by an excitation weight assigning part. Thus, the optimum array pattern is obtained in a desired direction in all bands of the OFDM signal, thereby realizing the transmission and reception without an influence of interference waves.

The distortion in the sub-carrier signals is determined by transmitting known values that are incorporated into the preamble portion of the frame and/or are incorporated into pilot symbols that are inserted into the data portion of the frame. The receiver typically receives these known values in a distorted form and then processes the distorted values together with the original known values to obtain a channel response. The channel response is then used to estimate the frequencies at which the channels are received.

Correlation times for a RAKE receiver are determined from time differentials between multipath components of a received signal based on correlation metrics, preferably signal strength measurements, associated with the multipath components. According to various embodiments of the present invention, selection strategies are employed in which "desired signal collecting" and "interference collecting" correlation times may be selected using average optimal (AO) or instantaneous optimal (IO) selection criteria. These criteria may include, for example, thresholds for signal strengths associated with multipath components of a signal at the correlation times, where the signal strengths may include absolute or relative measures of signal power or signal to noise ratio. According to alternative embodiments, correlation times are selected using an inverse filter of an estimated channel response. Related apparatus is also described.

A receiver configured for: a) receiving (410) a first OFDM symbol and generating a plurality of demodulated symbols for the first OFDM symbol; b) generating (420) decoder output code symbols corresponding to a subset of the plurality of demodulated symbols; c) determining (430) that a set of the decoder output code symbols make up a set of reference symbols corresponding to at least a portion of the subset of the plurality of demodulated symbols; d) generating (440) the set of reference symbols; e) generating (450) a set of channel estimates based on the set of reference symbols and the at least a portion of the subset of the plurality of demodulated symbols, for use in decoding a current OFDM symbol; and f) repeating steps b-e until a channel estimate for each demodulated symbol corresponding to the first OFDM symbol has been generated.