A manner of processing bit-interleaved data traffic in a communication network. In the increasingly-common scenario where data traffic is bit interleaved and scrambled using a PRBS (pseudo-random binary sequence) before it is transmitted from a sender to a receiver, the receiver is configured to receive the transmitted bit stream and decimate it, that is, remove the bits of the bit stream that are allocated for the receiver, prior to descrambling. To accomplish this, the receiver employs an LFSR (linear feedback shift register) similar or identical to the one used by the sender to scramble the data. The LFSR is initialized by employing helper bits inserted by the sender or an initialization unit, and may employ other techniques for phase adjustment or state skipping depending on the nature of the transmitted bit stream.