Universal lossless source controlled channel decoding for i.i.d. sequences

Messages coded and transmitted over a channel usually contain some redundancy which is not utilized by channel decoding techniques, especially if its governing statistical parameters are unknown. We propose to integrate universal lossless source coding techniques into channel decoding of redundant sequences with unknown statistics to improve performance of Viterbi and turbo decoding. Simulation results demonstrate that we achieve identical bit error rate (BER) performance to nonuniversal techniques that utilize prior knowledge of the message statistics and that if redundancy exists even in an a-priori unknown form, we can improve the code performance over standard techniques.