Method and apparatus for wireless communication employing confidence

Abstract

A communication system having a plurality of forward channel communications and a plurality of corresponding reverse channel communications from and to a plurality of mobile users. A plurality of collectors are distributed at macro-diverse locations for receiving reverse channel signals from the users which are processed to yield one or more sequences of data bits as a burst and corresponding one or more initial confidence metrics for each bit. The initial confidence metrics have an initial range, a.sub.in, represented by an initial number of bits, .gamma..sub.in, and are processed to form processed confidence metrics having a processed range, a.sub.p, represented by a processed number of bits, .gamma..sub.p. The collectors forward these reverse channel signals including the data bits and corresponding processed confidence metrics to aggregators. The aggregators combine the multiple collector signals for the same user received from the macro-diverse collectors. The combining of multiple collector signals for the same user results in an output bit stream for the user with fewer bit errors.