EXIT-Chart Optimized Block Codes for Wireless Video Telephony

In this paper we investigate a turbo detection scheme designed for robust video transmission over an uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel. We first introduce a novel block error-correcting code, referred to as an extrinsic information transfer (EXIT)-chart optimized block code (ECOBC), which benefits from soft decision decoding. The ECOBC exploits both the residual redundancy which manifests itself in terms of the non-uniform probability distribution of K-bit strings inherent in the video encoded bit-stream, as well as the intentional redundancy imposed by the ECOBC for mitigating the effects of transmission errors. As our first novel contribution, we address the design of ECOBCs by formulating the necessary and sufficient condition, which ensures that the EXIT function of the softbit ECOBC decoder reaches the (1,1) point in the EXIT chart. Secondly, we propose a novel real-valued free-distance metric for characterizing the ECOBC´s performance. Furthermore, the attainable performance and the computational complexity imposed by the ECOBC are investigated. The effects of the interleaver delay on the ECOBC´s performance are also quantified. As an additional result, we demonstrate that at a fixed system bandwidth, the turbo detection scheme using the H.264 video codec with the error concealment tools disabled but amalgamated with the proposed ECOBC as well as an additional generalized low-density parity-check (GLDPC) code may lead to an approximately 2.5 dB signal-to-noise ratio gain in comparison to the benchmarker having the same total bit rate, which operated the H.264 scheme with the error concealment tools enabled hence resulting in a higher video rate and amalgamated with the same-rate GLDPC code, but dispensing with our novel ECOBC.