A
receiver circuit suppresses effects of “benign” impairment from the calculation of received
signal quality estimates, such that the estimate depends primarily on the effects of non-benign impairment. For example, a received
signal may be subject to same-
cell and other-
cell interference plus
noise, which is generally modeled using a
Gaussian distribution, and also may be due to certain forms of self-interference, such as quadrature phase interference arising from imperfect derotation of the
pilot samples used to generate channel estimates for the received
signal. Such interference generally takes on a distribution defined by the
pilot signal modulation, e.g., a binomial distribution for binary
phase shift keying modulation. Interference arising from such sources is relatively “benign” as compared to
Gaussian interference and thus should be suppressed or otherwise discounted in
signal quality calculations. Suppression may be based on subtracting benign impairment correlation estimates from total impairment correlation estimates, or on filtering the benign impairment in channel
estimation.