Patent ID: 7346130

Claim:
A method comprising: joint demodulating a desired signal and one or more interfering signals with a Viterbi equalizer having an adaptive total number of states based on channel impulse response (CIR) coefficients associated with the desired signal and the one or more interfering signals; estimating a first plurality of CIR coefficients associated with the desired signal; determining a respective power in each of the first plurality of CIR coefficients; establishing one of the first plurality of CIR coefficients having a greatest power as a first reference coefficient; determining a corresponding relative power of each non-reference CIR coefficient in the first plurality in relation to the first reference coefficient; comparing the relative powers to a first threshold value; determining a lowest index value of the first plurality of CIR coefficients whose relative power is above the first threshold value; determining a highest index value of the first plurality of CIR coefficients whose relative power is above the first threshold value; and determining a span of the first plurality of CIR coefficients to be used in said joint demodulating based on the lowest index value and the highest index value.