Patent ID: 7515660

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; establishing one of a first plurality of CIR coefficients associated with the desired signal having a greatest power as a first reference coefficient; determining a corresponding relative power of each CIR coefficient of the first plurality of CIR coefficients other than the first reference coefficient in relation to the first reference coefficient; determining a lowest index value of the first plurality of CIR coefficients whose relative power is above a 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 the joint demodulating based on the lowest index value and the highest index value.