On the iterative approximation of optimal joint source-channel decoding

Joint source-channel decoding is formulated as an estimation problem. The optimal solution is stated and it is shown that it is not feasible in many practical systems due to its complexity. Therefore, a novel iterative procedure for the approximation of the optimal solution is introduced, which is based on the principle of iterative decoding of turbo codes. New analytical expressions for different types of information in the optimal algorithm are used to derive the iterative approximation. A direct comparison of the performance of the optimal algorithm and its iterative approximation is given for a simple transmission system with "short" channel codewords. Furthermore, the performance of iterative joint source-channel decoding is investigated for a more realistic system.