Patent ID: 8014473

Claim:
A method of minimizing probability of error for decoding messages of unequal lengths and unequal a posteriori probability for blind transport format detection (BTFD), comprising: receiving an incoming stream characterized by a preselected transport format; computing a metric for each possible transport format of the incoming stream, including the preselected format; and determining the preselected transport format based on a best one of the computed metrics, wherein the metric is a function of: ( α s ⁢ E ^ s ⁢ α p ⁢ ⁢ E ^ p ) β ⁡ ( α s ⁢ N ^ t ⁢ α p ⁢ E ^ p ) ⁢ E VD ⁡ ( n c ) - n c ⁡ ( α s ⁢ E ^ s ⁢ α p ⁢ ⁢ E ^ p ) 2 2 ⁢ α s ⁢ N ^ t ⁢ α p ⁢ E ^ p - n m ⁢ ln ⁡ ( 2 ) , where α s Ê s is an estimated energy of a signal component per symbol in the incoming stream, α p Ê p is an estimated energy of a pilot component per symbol in the incoming stream, α s {circumflex over (N)} t is an estimated noise variance per symbol in the incoming stream, n m is a length of a message corresponding to the transport format under consideration, n c is a length of a codeword corresponding to the transport format under consideration, and E VD (n c ) is an energy computed by a Viterbi decoder for a hypothesized codeword of length n c .