Patent ID: 7076000
Filing Date: 2006-07-11
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method of reducing calculations in the decoding of a M-ary modulated convolutionally coded signal in a radio communication system, the method comprising the steps of: a) determining a single function for a soft-decision metric for each bit in a symbol by restricting a set of all possible Gray-coded constellation points to those closest to a boundary between a bit value of 0 and 1 for each bit in an input symbol and applying a predetermined function corresponding to a range of restricted constellation points to an entire possible range of symbols; b) inputting the symbol; c) setting the soft-decision metric for each bit in the symbol using the predetermined function from the determining step; d) outputting the soft-decision metric for each bit of the symbol to a turbo decoder; e) decoding the symbol in the turbo decoder; and f) repeating steps a) through e) until all symbols to be input are decoded.