Patent ID: 7606319

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a jointly encoded signal over a multi-path channel by N receive antennas, wherein N is an integer greater than one; estimating a transmitted chip vector within a chip interval for the jointly encoded signal; for each of the N receive antennas, sampling the received signal to resolve an antenna-wise received chip vector for each of the N receive antennas; filtering a block of antenna-wise received chip vectors, the block comprising each of the N antenna-wise chip vectors, using a channel quality indicator that maximizes constrained mutual information between the estimated transmitted chip vector and the block of antenna-wise received chip vectors; downconverting the filtered block to one of bits and symbols; detecting in parallel, for each spreading code by which the jointly encoded signal is spread, the downconverted bits or symbols, wherein the channel quality indicator describes the entire multi-path channel over which the signal was received by the N antennas and wherein the channel quality indicator comprises a generalized signal to noise ratio that represents all channel uses of the multiple input/multiple output multi-path channel over which the jointly encoded signal was received.