Patent Document ID: 9407475
Application ID: 14341869
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of soft output multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) decoding, the method comprising: generating a tree-graph of bits based on: MIMO rank of a receiver, number of bits per layer in the graph, and type of modulation, wherein the tree-graph comprises a root node, leaf nodes, nodes, and branches connecting the nodes; performing sphere decoding by determining a radius covering a subset of nodes within said tree-graph; managing, based on the sphere decoding, tables comprising metrics and counter metrics usable for log likelihood ratio (LLR) generation; predicting, based on a specified prediction scheme, predicted counter metrics for partial paths in the tree-graph that comprise nodes and branches outside the determined radius; and updating at least a portion of the tables comprising the metrics and the counter metrics with the predicted counter metrics when the predicted counter metrics are better in maximum likelihood terms than the counter metrics stored in the tables, wherein predicting a counter metric for a specific partial path in the tree-graph is done by adding a Euclidean distance of a full path with a lowest metric found (metric ML ) minus a partial Euclidean distance for a level i of the full path with the lowest metric found (PED i ML ) to a partial Euclidean distance for level i of the specific partial path (PED i ) and i is an integer between 1 and the number of levels in the tree-graph.