Patent ID: 7433432

Claim:
A communication system, comprising: a plurality of transmit sources operable to transmit a plurality of symbols over a plurality of channels; an adaptive detector operable to: receive a plurality of symbols corresponding to said plurality of transmitted symbols; measure the signal quality of said plurality of symbols; implement a detection process based on said measurement of signal quality; and use said detection process to generate decisions for detecting said plurality of transmitted symbols; wherein said detector comprises an equalization-based detector operable to process said plurality of symbols transmitted over a well-conditioned channel; and wherein said detector further operable to: process said received symbols to obtain initial estimates of said transmitted symbols; use said initial estimates to generate a plurality of reduced search sets; and use said reduced search set to generate said decisions for detecting said transmitted symbols; wherein said reduced search set is obtained by: (a) finding the eligible constellation points corresponding to each noisy estimated transmit symbol, thereby defining a reduced search set for the transmitted symbol vector; and (b) searching over the reduced set for the transmit symbol vector that minimizes ∥y-Hx∥ 2 , thereby generating an estimate of the transmitted symbol.