Patent ID: 8331510

Claim:
A receiver adapted to mitigating inter-symbol interference in a received signal, said receiver comprising: a two-stage equalizer including: a demodulation first stage that processes the received signal and produces initial symbol decisions; and a non-linear equalization second stage that uses the received signal to perform a sequential search in an attempt to improve upon the initial symbol decisions, wherein: if able to improve upon the initial symbol decisions, then an output sequence is obtained from the sequential search; and if not able to improve upon the initial symbol decisions, then the output sequence is the initial symbol decisions, wherein: the first stage outputs the initial symbol decisions ŝ 1:K which are augmented with reliability measures μ k , where the reliability measures μ k indicate a reliability of each symbol ŝ k at index k; and the second stage uses the initial symbol decisions ŝ 1:K and the reliability measures μ k to restrict a fanout of at least one index k of the sequential search by setting a restricted constellation Q′ k of size q′ k , where the value of q′ k is between 1 and q.