Chapter 12
Conclusions and Future Research
12.1 Chapter 1: Introduction
This chapter constituted the general background of our studies throughout the book. More specifically, a brief overview of the literature of source encoding and soft source decoding was presented in Section 1.1.1. Then the development of iterative decoding techniques and their convergence analysis was described in Section 1.1.3. Furthermore, as a special case of iterative decoding, joint source–channel decoding was introduced and the main contributions to the open literature were summarized in Section 1.1.2. Finally, the organization of the book was described in Section 1.4, while our novel contributions were highlighted in Section 1.5.
12.2 Chapter2:Information Theory Basics
In this chapter we focussed our attention on the basic Shannonian information transmission scheme and highlighted the differences between Shannon’s theory, valid for ideal source and channel codecs as well as for Gaussian channels, and its ramifications for Rayleigh channels. We also argued that practical finite-delay source codecs cannot operate at transmission rates as low as the entropy of the source. However, these codecs do not have to operate losslessly, since perceptually unobjectionable distortions can be tolerated. This allows us to reduce the associated bit rate.
Since wireless channels exhibit bursty error statistics, the error bursts can only be randomized with the aid of infinite-length channel interleavers, which are not ...
