Patent ID: 7912156

Claim:
A method to operate a digital signal receiver, comprising: detecting occurrence of a symbol degrading event for a received signal, wherein the symbol degrading event occurs after transmission and before reception of the received signal, wherein detecting further comprises: multiplexing a received symbol stream by a multiplexor and outputting a block of L contiguous parallel symbols to a signal to noise ratio (SNR) estimator, where L is an integer greater than or equal to one; estimating a SNR of the block of L contiguous parallel symbols; comparing the estimated SNR to a threshold SNR value; applying a comparison result as a control signal and a delayed received symbol stream to a symbol multiplexor; and providing an output of the symbol multiplexor for error correction decoding; inserting zero symbols into the received symbol stream to replace symbols degraded by the signal degrading event prior to de-interleaving the received signal, wherein inserting further comprises replacing by the symbol multiplexor the block of L contiguous parallel symbols with L zero symbols in response to the estimated SNR being less than the threshold SNR value; and performing the error correction decoding of the received symbol stream having the inserted zero symbols.