Patent ID: 7437172

Claim:
A method for detecting discontinuous transmission (DTX) frames in a wireless communication system, comprising: ascertaining whether a frame received for a primary transmission in a particular frame interval is a good frame or not a good frame based on an error detection code, a good frame being a correctly decoded frame; if the received frame is a good frame with correctly decoded data, skipping DTX detection for the received frame; and if the received frame is not a good frame, performing DTX detection and determining whether the received frame is a DTX frame or an erased frame based on a plurality of metrics determined for the primary transmission and a secondary transmission received during the particular frame intervals, wherein the plurality of metrics include a symbol error rate (SER) of re-encoded symbols for the received frame, energy of the received frame, and energy of the secondary transmission received during the particular frame interval, and wherein the frame energy is computed as energy of good recovered symbols in the received frame minus energy of bad recovered symbols, wherein the good and bad recovered symbols correspond to no symbol errors and symbol errors, respectively.