Patent Document ID: 20050254605
Application ID: 10422083
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for decoding data encoded as trellis-code modulation (TCM) symbols, the method comprising the steps of: receiving digital data for a received signal constellation point as one or more pairs of in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) values; calculating soft decision values corresponding to each received pair of (I,Q) values that defines a set of n least significant bits of received data, where n is the number of bits of data that were subject to convolutional encoding in the TCM encoding process; calculating multiple branch metric values for use in the decoding process, from the soft decision values; Viterbi decoding n bits of data at a time using the multiple branch metric values, and producing n bits at a time of output data; re-encoding the n bits at a time of output data to determine the coset membership of the received pairs of (I,Q) values; using the re-encoded data to process unencoded data bits in a hard decision process to recover multiple uncoded bits of received data; and assembling the recovered uncoded bits of received data with the n bits of decoded data output from the viterbi decoding step, to provide a complete data symbol; and wherein the viterbi decoding step employs a full rate trellis, without de-puncturing.