Patent ID: 8761323

Claim:
A method performed in a receive node of a communication network, the receive node being structured to operate on a data stream transmitted from a transmit node, the method comprising: performing, by the receive node, a first stage processing a symbol of interest contained in a first composite signal; and performing, by the receive node, a second stage processing the same symbol of interest contained in a second composite signal, wherein the first stage processing comprises: determining a first stage impairment covariance estimate; determining one or more first stage combining weights based on the first stage impairment covariance estimate; performing a first stage equalization of the first composite signal based on the first stage combining weights to generate a first stage equalized signal; determining one or more first stage interfering symbol estimates based on the first stage equalized signal; and canceling the first stage interfering symbol estimates from the first composite signal to generate an interference-reduced version of the first composite signal, and wherein the second stage processing comprises: determining a second stage impairment covariance estimate based on the first stage impairment covariance estimate and one or more previous stage interfering symbol estimates; and determining one or more second stage combining weights based on the second stage impairment covariance estimate; performing a second stage equalization of the second composite signal based on the second stage combining weights to generate a second stage equalized signal, wherein the second composite signal is based on the interference-reduced version of the first composite signal, and wherein the previous stage corresponds to the first stage processing or to a previous run of the second stage processing.