Patent ID: 8571145

Claim:
A method for decoding received data, the received data comprising in-phase data and quadrature data and the received data including a combination of data transmitted by multiple transmit antennas, the method comprising: (a) defining a bounded region based on a number of most significant bits for the in-phase and the quadrature received data, the number of most significant bits being less than or equal to a total number of bits for each of the in-phase and the quadrature received data; (b) calculating possible candidates to the same number of most significant bits of the received data used to define the bounded region; (c) storing the calculated most significant bits of any possible candidates considered to be inside the bounded region and discarding any candidates considered to be outside the bounded region; (d) increasing the number of most significant bits for the in-phase and the quadrature received data; (e) repeating (a) to (d) until no more than one candidate remains, wherein (a) is repeated using the increased number of most significant bits and (b) is repeated using only the stored most significant bits of possible candidates; (f) when less than one candidate remains, calculating all the bits for each remaining candidate of an immediately previous iteration and selecting the candidate having a closest Euclidean distance to the received data to obtain one remaining candidate; and (g) outputting signals representing an identifier of the one remaining candidate.