Patent ID: 8681835

Claim:
A method performed in a receive node of a communication network to perform interference cancellation (IC), the method comprising: using IC receiver, performing a first stage processing a symbol of interest contained in a first composite signal, the first composite signal being a signal in a chip domain; and using the IC receiver, performing a second stage processing the same symbol of interest contained in a second composite signal, the second composite signal also being a signal in the chip domain, wherein the first stage processing comprises: first stage despreading and combining the first composite signal in the chip domain to obtain first stage equalized symbols in a symbol domain; first stage generating first stage symbol estimates in the symbol domain based on the first stage equalized symbols; first stage regenerating a first stage signal estimate in the chip domain based on the first stage symbol estimates; and first stage interference canceling the first stage signal estimate from the first composite signal in the chip domain to generate an interference reduced version of the first composite signal, and wherein the second stage processing comprises: second stage despreading and combining the second composite signal in the chip domain to obtain second stage symbol values in the symbol domain; second stage symbol adding-back a scaled version of a previous stage symbol estimates to the second stage symbol values to obtain second stage equalized symbols in the symbol domain; and second stage generating second stage symbol estimates in the symbol domain based on the second stage equalized symbols, wherein the second composite signal is based on the interference-reduced version of the first composite signal, and wherein in the step of second stage generating the second stage symbol estimates, the previous stage symbol estimates are the first stage symbol estimates or the second stage symbol estimates generated in a previous run of the second stage processing.