On the utilization of residual source redundancy for iterative joint source-channel decoding of variable-length codes

We present a novel symbol-based a posteriori probability (APP) decoder for packetized variable-length encoded source indices transmitted over wireless channels, which exploits residual index correlations after source encoding for error correction. By additionally protecting the variable-length encoded bitstream with channel codes, an iterative decoding scheme can be obtained where the proposed APP source decoder serves as constituent decoder.