Joint distributed source-channel decoding for LDPC-coded binary Markov sources

We propose a novel joint decoding technique for distributed source-channel (DSC) coded systems for transmission of correlated binary Markov sources over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. In the proposed scheme, relatively short-length, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are independently used to encode the bit sequences of each source. To reconstruct the original bit sequence, a joint source-channel decoding (JSCD) technique is proposed which exploits the knowledge of both temporal and source correlations. The JSCD technique is composed of two stages, which are iteratively performed. First, a sum-product (SP) decoder is serially concatenated with a BCJR decoder, where the knowledge of source memory is utilized during local (horizontal) iterations. Then, the estimate of correlation between the sources is used to update the concatenated decoder during global (vertical) iterations. Therefore, the correlation of the sources is assumed as side information in the subsequent global iteration of each concatenated decoder. From the simulation results of frame/bit error rate (FER/BER), we note that significant gains are achieved by the proposed decoding scheme with respect to the case where the correlation knowledge is not completely utilized at the decoder.