Joint Source-Channel Decoding Over MIMO Channels Based on Partial Marginalization

We investigate fast joint source-channel decoding employed for communication over frequency-flat and frequency-selective block-fading multiple-input multiple-output channels. Our setting has applications for communication with short codes under low-latency constraints. The case of no transmitter channel state information is considered. We propose a partial marginalization decoder that allows performance to be traded for computational complexity, by adjusting a user parameter. By tuning this parameter to its maximum value, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) decoder is obtained. In the conducted simulations, the proposed scheme almost achieves the MMSE performance for a wide range of the channel signal-to-noise ratios, with significant reductions in computational complexity.