Unified interference rejection combining

A wireless communication receiver to adaptively demodulate a received signal, comprising:

• an algorithm control unit that selects one from a plurality of signal detection algorithms available at the receiver;
• an interference rejection combining (IRC) control unit that determines whether or not to use interference rejection combining for demodulation in which spatial correlation of impairment component of the received signal is utilized for demodulation;
• a whitening filter generation unit that computes coefficients of a whitening filter from an impairment correlation matrix;
• and
• a whitening filter unit that performs, prior to signal detection by the selected one of the plurality of signal detection algorithms, signal filtering using the whitening filter.

A method of decoding data modulated using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique implemented at a receiver having multiple receive antennas, comprising:

• receiving the OFDM signal over the multiple antennas;
• determining a spatial correlation of an impairment component of the received signals;
• generating coefficients of a whitening filter based on the determined spatial correlation;
• applying the whitening filter to the received signal for de-correlating the impairment component of the received signal;
• and
• performing symbol detection on the de-correlated signal using one of a plurality of signal detection circuits that do not use impairment spatial correlation.

A method of recovering data from a received signal that includes an interference component, implemented at a receiver comprising multiple receiving antennas, the method comprising:

• estimating, at the receiver, an impairment covariance matrix for signals received at the multiple receiving antennas, wherein the impairment covariance matrix represents a statistical covariance of the interference component of the received signal;
• computing a Cholesky decomposition of the impairment covariance matrix by using one of an upper- and a lower- triangular Cholesky factor matrix depending on relative power levels of impairment component of the signals received at the multiple receiving antennas;
• generating a whitening filter from the Cholesky decomposition, wherein the whitening filter de-correlates received interference over the multiple receiving antennas by using spatial correlation of the impairment across the multiple receiving antennas;
• applying the whitening filter to the received signal;
• and
• operating a detection algorithm upon an output of the whitening filter to generate estimates of bits of the data from the received signal.

A digital communication receiver apparatus comprising multiple received antennas, a memory, and a processor, wherein the apparatus performs a method of recovering data from signals received at the multiple antennas, wherein the signals include an interference component, the method comprising:

• estimating, at the receiver, an impairment covariance matrix for signals received at the multiple receiving antennas, wherein the impairment covariance matrix represents a statistical covariance of the interference component of the received signal;
• computing a Cholesky decomposition of the impairment covariance matrix by using one of an upper- and a lower- triangular Cholesky factor matrix depending on relative power levels of impairment component of the signals received at the multiple receiving antennas;
• generating a whitening filter from the Cholesky decomposition, wherein the whitening filter de-correlates received interference over the multiple receiving antennas by using spatial correlation of the impairment across the multiple receiving antennas;
• applying the whitening filter to the received signal;
• and
• operating a detection algorithm upon an output of the whitening filter to generate estimates of bits of the data from the received signal.