A new coding scheme for the noisy-channel Slepian-Wolf problem: separate design and joint decoding

A new scheme for solving the Slepian-Wolf problem over noisy channels using serially concatenated codes is proposed. An outer low density parity check code is used to perform distributed source coding, and an inner convolutional code adds error protecting capability to the compressed data. A soft iterative joint source-channel decoder is performed, where the decoder side information is provided to the sub outer decoder instead of the sub inner decoder. The scheme is attractive since separate refining of compression rate (outer code) and error protection power (inner code) makes the design easy and the performance controllable, and joint iterative decoding exploits the power of the serial concatenated structure as much as possible. Simulations reveal encouraging joint decoding gain especially at low signal-to-noise ratios.