Patent ID: 8249196

Claim:
An equalizing structure for a receiving device of a wireless communication system, in which two or more transmit signals transmitted in parallel from one or more transmitters are received in received signal vectors representing two or more received data streams, the signals comprising information modulated onto carrier signals according to a modulation scheme, wherein all possible transmit signals are represented by candidate constellation values in the signal constellation of the modulation scheme, the structure comprising: a metric value calculator adapted to calculate metric values based on the received signal vectors and the product of channel estimation values with candidate signal vectors, each candidate signal vector comprising a candidate constellation value for each of the two or more transmit signals; a maximum likelihood detector adapted to detect one of the candidate signal vectors having a minimum Euclidean distance to a respective receive signal vector as a most likely transmit signal vector based on the metric values; and a soft decision value calculator adapted to calculate a soft decision value for the most likely candidate signal vectors based on differences between the candidate signal vectors of at least some of the metric values.