Method and apparatus for improved turbo multiuser detector

A multi-user turbo decoder combining multi-user detection and forward error correction decoding is disclosed that utilizes iterative decoding of received, interfering signals, and the construction of a decoding tree of the decoder is changed for each iteration of the decoding based on the previous conditional probability estimates of the value of the data bits of each signal making up the received, interfering signals. Before each iteration of multi-user decoding, a probability estimate is calculated that the value of the bit in a signal has a certain value for all of the data bits. Using the probability estimate a new decoding tree is constructed before each iteration of decoding such that the signal bit having the most reliable estimate is assigned to the lowest or root level of the tree. Using the probability estimate for the other signal bits, the signal bit having the next most reliable estimate is assigned to the second level of the tree, and so forth, with the signal bit having the least reliable estimate being assigned to the highest level of the tree adjacent the terminating nodes or leaves of the tree. By building the decoding tree in this manner for each iteration of symbol decoding, a reduced complexity search is more likely to include paths (and nodes) in the tree containing the correct value for the channel symbols.