Patent ID: 8040985

Claim:
A communication receiver, comprising: a front end, which is arranged to receive a Radio Frequency (RF) signal, which comprises modulated symbols carrying data that have been encoded by a block Forward Error Correction (FEC) code, and to convert the RF signal to a sequence of soft received symbols, wherein the soft received symbols are subject to distortion by at least first and second noise components having respective at least first and second statistical distributions; a metric calculation unit, which is arranged to process the soft received symbols so as to extract a first parameter indicative of the first statistical distribution and a second parameter indicative of the second statistical distribution, and to compute FEC metrics based on the extracted first and second parameters by evaluating the FEC metrics responsively to the first statistical distribution over a range of values of the second noise component assuming the second statistical distribution is constant, weighting the evaluated FEC metrics using a weight function, and integrating the weighted FEC metrics over the range of values of the second noise component; and a FEC decoder, which is arranged to accept the FEC metrics as input, and to process the metrics in an iterative FEC decoding process so as to decode the FEC code and reconstruct the data.