The present invention combines multi-user detection with
packet combining. In multi-user detection, the
receiver jointly demodulates user's data by exploiting the structure of multi-user interference, the
packet combining is an enhancement of standard
automatic repeat request protocol, in which the erroneous packet are not discarded but preserved and combined with retransmitted ones to improve subsequent decisions. One embodiment of the two-stage
detector uses a first stage in which the packets are combined and then decoded, in order to improve tentative decisions for interference cancellation. The decoder output is then used in the second stage to cancel the interference, and then the combining is performed once again, before the final decoding. For the two-stage detection we consider two decoding schemes in the first stage. One is the soft input / soft output maximum
a posteriori probability decoding of the combined packets, then a soft interference cancellation is performed in the second stage. In the second embodiment, we use the hard decision Viterbi /
Turbo decoding, and a hard interference cancellation in the second stage. In the
simulation we include
power control, quantization, and timing, phase and amplitude
estimation. The results indicate that the proposed scheme with
packet combining and multi-user detection employed jointly significantly improve performance in the high channel load, increasing the robustness of the
system.