Coded modulation system with a simplified decoder capable of reducing

Abstract

A receiver for deciding which signal points were sent from a transmitter based on corresponding noise affected signals received via a distorting channel, the noise affected signals carrying information about a particular sequence of encoding states occupied in a succession of time intervals by a finite state process having a finite number of possible encoding states, the receiver including modifying circuitry for generating a plurality of different modified versions of each received signal, and a decoder for deciding which signal points were sent based on estimating a particular sequence of decoder states by storing a number of path histories of previous signal points and using the modified versions to extend the path histories, the different modified versions of each received signal numbering fewer than the number of stored path histories. In other aspects, the constellation of signal points is partitioned into decision subsets, each possible transitions from a possible decoder state are associated with a decision subset, based on the signal points in the path histories, and each of the modified versions is associated with one of the decision subsets; there are fewer modified versions than the number of decoder states; and the decoder states number fewer than the number of decoder states in an optimum trellis decoder.