Soft selection combining based on successive erasures of frequency band components in a communication system

Abstract

Techniques for processing received information in a communication system, such that performance is significantly improved in the presence of certain types of interference. In an illustrative embodiment, first and second digital sidebands are transmitted on either side of an FM or AM host carrier signal in a hybrid in-band on-channel (HIBOC) digital audio broadcasting (DAB) system. The compressed digital audio information in the sidebands is encoded using an outer code, e.g., a cyclic redundancy code (CRC), and an inner code, e.g., a complementary punctured pair convolutional (CPPC) code. A receiver generates an error indicator based at least in part on a first decoding of the received information. The error indicator characterizes interference associated with at least one of the digital sidebands. The receiver then generates at least one alternative decoding of the received information if the error indicator has a designated characteristic. For example, the receiver may generate the alternative decoding by eliminating from consideration in the receiver decoding process a designated portion of at least one of the digital sidebands. The error indicator may be indicative of the presence or absence of a first adjacent interference signal of a particular level within a frequency band associated with one of the sidebands, and may be based on, e.g., a signal-to-noise ratio measurement generated from a pilot tone associated with a given sideband, and/or an error flag generated using the CRC outer code. Portions of the given sideband may be eliminated from consideration via successive erasures of sideband components, i.e., subbands, thereby resulting in an increase in the effective code rate of the inner code.