Apparatus and method for erasure detection and soft-decision decoding in cellular system receiver

An apparatus for erasure detection and soft-decision decoding in a cellular system receiver for decoding a code block received from a cellular system transmitter, comprising:

• a channel gain and noise variance estimator for estimating a complex channel gain and a noise variance of the received code block;
• an erasure detector for detecting an erasure symbol (a received symbol with high power interference) by comparing a threshold value based on the estimated complex channel gain or the noise variance with power of the received symbol;
• a soft-decision decoding metric calculator for setting log-likelihood ratios of constituent bits of the erasure symbols to be 0 and computing the log-likelihood ratios of the constituent bits of other received symbols;
• and
• a soft-decision channel decoder for decoding the received code block with the calculated log-likelihood ratios, wherein the erasure detector detects the received symbol as the erasure symbol when the power of the received symbol is greater than the threshold value,
• wherein the threshold value includes a value which is determined based on a sum of the power of the fading channel gain of the received symbol and a constant multiple of an average noise variance.