Patent ID: 8422598

Claim:
A method for decoding a signal sent by a sender through a transmission channel and received by a receiver comprising at least one receiving antenna, the method comprising: selecting, among at least two decoding techniques available in said receiver, a decoding technique that is representative of a space/time encoding implemented at sending, taking account of at least one selection criterion, wherein at least one of said selection criterion takes account of an outage probability of the transmission channel, and wherein selecting selects a sub-optimal decoding technique when an instantaneous capacity of said transmission channel is lower than a transmission rate, in terms of bits per channel use, and selects an optimal decoding technique in terms of maximum likelihood (ML) when the instantaneous capacity of the transmission channel is greater than or equal to the transmission rate, in terms of bits per channel use; and decoding said signal implementing the selected decoding technique, wherein selecting and decoding are implemented adaptively, as a function of a variation of the transmission channel.