Patent ID: 8451956

Claim:
A method for mitigating noise in symbols received via a wireless network in a receiver, comprising: estimating, in the receiver, a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a symbol; conditioning the symbol in the receiver, wherein the conditioning is performed as a function of the estimated SNR, and wherein the conditioning is performed in time-domain, frequency-domain, or spatial-domain or combinations thereof, and wherein the conditioning is applied to an amplitude, phase, or energy level, or combinations thereof; generating a weighting coefficient w for the symbol to quantify a reliability of received data symbols, wherein a weight assignment function of the weighting coefficient is given by w i = { 1 σ 2 ≤ σ 0 2 σ 0 2 / σ 2 σ 0 2 < σ 2 < k ⁢ ⁢ σ 0 2 0 σ 2 ≥ k ⁢ ⁢ σ 0 2 , where k is a constant much greater than one; and estimating the reliability, which is a log likelihood v of an i-th S i of the symbol as L ( S i =v;σ i 2 )≅ w i L( S i = v ;σ 0 2 ), where σ i 2 is a noise energy of an i-th symbol, σ 0 2 is constant noise energy, and w i , is the weighting coefficient for the i-th symbol, wherein a value of w i is based on the SNR of the i-th symbol, and L(S i =v,σ 0 2 ) is a likelihood of the value v of the symbol i-th under σ 0 2 .