Frequency-domain multi-stage group detection for alleviating inter-symbol interference

Abstract

A receiver comprises plural receive antennas and electronic circuitry. The plural receive antennas are configured to receive, on plural subcarriers transmitted over a radio interface, a frequency domain signal that comprises contribution from a block of time domain symbols. The electronic circuitry is configured or operable to perform symbol detection of time domain symbols comprising the block by performing a multi-stage joint detection procedure comprising plural stages, and thus serves as a detector (). For a first stage the block is divided into a first number of sub-blocks each having a sub-block first size. For a second stage the block is divided into a second number of sub-blocks each having a sub-block second size, the sub-block second size being greater than the sub-block first size. For each stage a detector () formulates frequency domain combining weights and uses the frequency domain combining weights for combining multiple receive versions of each subcarrier to provide candidate symbol combination values for symbols in each sub-block of the respective stage. For the second stage the detector () is further configured to use the candidate symbol combination values of the first stage to formulate joint hypotheses to serve as candidates for the joint detection operation of the second stage.