Patent ID: 7397843

Claim:
A method of processing a received composite communications signal that includes two or more signals of interest, the method comprising the steps of: generating combining weights as a function of impairment correlations for despread values of the input signals; combining the despread values according to the combining weights; and, jointly detecting the signals of interest based on the combined despread values and mixing between symbols in a detection metric; wherein said step of jointly detecting the signals of interest further comprises jointly demodulating the combined despread values to obtain soft values representing estimates of detected bits in the signals of interest; wherein said step of jointly demodulating the combined despread values to obtain soft values representing estimates of detected bits in the signals of interest further comprises generating soft values by a non-exhaustive tree search technique; wherein said step of generating soft values by a non-exhaustive tree search technique further comprises the steps of: generating a causal factorization of a s-parameter matrix; generating first symbol estimates of a transmitted symbol vector; generating a reduced set of cumulative metrics based on the causal factorization of the s-parameter matrix and first symbol estimates of the transmitted symbol vector by producing a set of cumulative metrics using an m-algorithm processor; and generating soft bit values based on the set of cumulative metrics produced by the m-algorithm processor.