Joint turbo decoding and estimation of hidden Markov sources

We describe a joint source-channel scheme for modifying a turbo decoder in order to exploit the statistical characteristics of hidden Markov sources. The basic idea is to treat the trellis describing the hidden Markov source as another constituent decoder which exchanges information with the other constituent decoder blocks. The source block uses as extrinsic information the probability of the input bits that is provided by the constituent decoder blocks. On the other hand, it produces a new estimation of such a probability which will be used as extrinsic information by the constituent turbo decoders. The proposed joint source-channel decoding technique leads to significantly improved performance relative to systems in which source statistics are not exploited and avoids the need to perform any explicit source coding prior to transmission. Lack of a priori knowledge of the source parameters does not degrade the performance of the system, since these parameters can be jointly estimated with turbo decoding.