Joint source coding, unity rate precoding and FFH-MFSK modulation using iteratively decoded irregular variable length coding

Serially concatenated and iteratively decoded Irregular Variable Length Coding (IrVLC) combined with precoded Fast Frequency Hopping (FFH) M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK) is considered. The proposed joint source and channel coding scheme is capable of low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) operation in Rayleigh fading channels contaminated by Partial Band Noise Jamming (PBNJ). The IrVLC scheme is comprised of a number of component Variable Length Coding (VLC) codebooks employing different coding rates for encoding particular fractions of the input source symbol stream. These fractions may be chosen with the aid of EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts in order to shape the inverted EXIT curve of the IrVLC codec so that it can be matched with the EXIT curve of the inner decoder. We demonstrate that using the proposed scheme near-zero bit error ratio may be achieved at low SNR values and the IrVLC based scheme yields a further gain of up to 0.3dB over the identical-rate single-class VLC based benchmarker scheme.