During cell search procedure in 3GPP LTE wireless communication system it is required to detect multiple cells which may be observable by a client terminal. In conventional cell detection a client terminal may detect false cells along with true cells. The number of false cells may depend on specific conventional detection algorithm used. A method and apparatus are disclosed that use of Differential Correlation based SINR metric for filtering out false cells from the list of detected cells reported by the conventional cell detection methods. The combination of conventional cell detection and Differential Correlation SINR based false cell filtering enables significant reduction in false cells reported to the network and reduces power consumption in a client terminal.