Patent ID: 7167502

Claim:
A communication station comprising a receiver, a transmitter and at least one antenna, including: means for orthogonally decoding data received from another communication station, the data having been encoded in a plurality of packets, each packet having a plurality of signal points in a field, the signal points of consecutively transmitted symbols being correlated unless a symbol rate is changed, the data having been further encoded such that only orthogonal descendants of a selected maximum rate code are used for communications with the communication station, means for identifying the signal points of consecutively transmitted symbols in the decoded data and recognizing a change in the rate of data transmission when the signal points of consecutively transmitted signal points are not correlated, and wherein two consecutive symbols ρ t and ρ t+1 are decoded at a first symbol rate when the data is decoded, (b) if both symbols ρ t and ρ t+1 are considered valid, both symbols ρ t and ρ t+1 are decoded to determine whether they are correlated; (c) if the symbols ρ t and ρ t+1 are not correlated, then the first symbols are not correlated, then the first symbol ρ t is output and the symbols ρ t+1 and a following symbol ρ t+2 are decoded; and (d) if both symbols ρ t+1 and ρ t+2 are considered valid, designating the symbols ρ t+1 and ρ t+2 as the symbols ρ t and ρ t+1 and repeating steps (b), (c) and (d), unless consecutive symbols are correlated.