Iterative Detection of Three-Stage Concatenated FFH-MFSK

Serially concatenated and iteratively decoded Irregular Variable Length Coding (IrVLC) combined with preceded Fast Frequency Hopping (FFH) M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK) is considered. We employ Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts to investigate the 3-stage concatenation of the FFH-MFSK demodulator, the rate-1 decoder and the outer IrVLC decoder. The proposed joint source and channel coding scheme is capable of operating at low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) 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 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 an inflnitesimally low bit error ratio may be achieved at low SNR values.