Copyright © 2008 Huijun Chen and Lei Cao. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We consider the decoding of wireless communication systems with both source coding in the application layer and channel coding in the physical layer for high-performance transmission over fading channels. Variable length error correcting codes (VLECs) and space time trellis codes (STTCs) are used to provide bandwidth efficient data compression as well as coding and diversity gains. At the receiver, an iterative joint source and space time decoding scheme are developed to utilize redundancy in both STTC and VLEC to improve overall decoding performance. Issues such as the inseparable systematic information in the symbol level, the asymmetric trellis structure of VLEC, and information exchange between bit and symbol domains have been considered in the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) decoding algorithm. Simulation results indicate that the developed joint decoding scheme achieves a significant decoding gain over the separate decoding in fading channels, whether or not the channel information is perfectly known at the receiver. Furthermore, how rate allocation between STTC and VLEC affects the performance of the joint source and space-time decoder is investigated. Different systems with a fixed overall information rate are studied. It is shown that for a system with more redundancy dedicated to the source code and a higher order modulation of STTC, the joint decoding yields better performance, though with increased complexity.