Patent ID: 8446989

Claim:
A signal demultiplexing method for determining a likelihood of each bit included in a second signal, which is spatially multiplexed with and received with a first signal, based on a maximum likelihood detection (MLD) method using QR decomposition, the first signal excluding the second signal to be calculated only in a final stage of the MLD method, the signal demultiplexing method comprising: for each of a plurality of signal point candidates of the first signal, detecting a closest neighboring signal point to thereby obtain a plurality of closest neighboring signal points, wherein each of the signal point candidates of the first signal is determined by one stage before the final stage, and each of the closest neighboring signal points is a point that is on a constellation of points in a signal space of the second signal and that has a smallest distance from a signal point calculated based on each of the signal point candidates of the first signal, respectively; for each of the plurality of closest neighboring signal points, identifying a plurality of bit-inversed points that are each closest to the closest neighboring signal point within a corresponding group of bit-inversed points, wherein plural groups of bit-inversed points respectively include signal points on the constellation of points that have one of plural bits in the closest neighboring signal inversed; calculating a first distance from each of unitary-converted received signal points, to each of the plurality of signal point candidates of the first signal and to each of the plurality of neighboring signal points, to thereby obtain a plurality of first distances; calculating a second distance from each of the unitary-converted received signal points to each of the plurality of bit-inversed points that are closest to each of the closest neighboring signal points, to thereby obtain a plurality of second distances; and determining a likelihood of each bit included in the second signal by identifying a corresponding smallest value among both the calculated plurality of first distances and the calculated plurality of second distances, wherein, the identifying step identifies the plurality of bit-inversed points based on stored information, which defines correspondence between each of signal points on the constellation of points and a plurality of bit-inversed points that are each closest to each of the signal points within a corresponding second group of bit-inversed points, wherein plural second groups of bit-inversed points respectively include signal points on the constellation of points that have one of plural bits, in each of the signal points, inversed.