Patent ID: 7653153

Claim:
A method of estimating and using a measure of trust of data conveyed by a QAM symbol in a channel of a QAM transmission process having at least 16 constellation points, comprising: calculating the measure of trust as a linear function of the modulus of a channel state estimation and responding to the calculated measure of trust with a bit decoder to generate a received sequence of bits, wherein the measure of trust is a log-likelihood ratio (LLR), and where, for K=1, LLR(b I,K ), is calculated in accordance with {r[i]e −jφch(i) } where LLR(b I,K ) is the log-likelihood ratio of bit K of the in-phase component of a received symbol, represents the real part of a complex number, r[i] is the received symbol in channel i ch , and e −jφch(i) represents the reciprocal of the phase response of the i th transmission channel over which the received symbol was transmitted.