Patent ID: 7672401

Claim:
A system for estimating data transmitted by a plurality of transmit elements across a communications channel, comprising: a) a plurality of receive interfaces, each receive interface operative to receive a signal via the communications channel and output a respective sequence of received data elements; b) a space matched filter connected to said plurality of receive interfaces and operative to: i) assemble the received data elements into sets of received data elements, each said set of the received data elements including at least one received data element from each sequence of received data elements; and ii) jointly process each set of the received data elements with each of a plurality of channel data elements to produce a corresponding plurality of filtered data elements, each filtered data element being associated with one of the transmit elements, each channel data element being representative of a portion of the communications channel between an associated one of the transmit elements and said plurality of receive interfaces; and c) a detector connected to said space matched filter and operative to process each filtered data element to produce a corresponding decision data set, the decision data set for each filtered data element includes a soft decision data set comprising a set of values, each value in the set of values being indicative of a likelihood or reliability associated with transmission of a corresponding symbol by the transmit element associated with the particular filtered data element and where the likelihood or reliability includes an a posteriori probability computed at least partly on the basis of: iii) the particular filtered data element; iv) the corresponding symbol; and v) a plurality of correlation data elements, each correlation data element being representative of a relationship between the channel data element associated with the transmit element associated with the particular filtered data element and a corresponding one of the channel data elements associated with a different one of the transmit elements.