Turbo DeCodulation: iterative joint source channel decoding and demodulation

The fundament at framework for today's digital communication system is given by the information theoretical considerations of Shannon. It was soon discovered that due to the constraints of real world applications a joint design of the different components of the communication system, e. g., source coding, channel coding, and modulation, is beneficial if not essential. A breakthrough in closely approaching the information theoretical limits at a moderate and manageable complexity has been the discovery of Turbo decoding for concatenated channel codes. The underlying Turbo principle of exchanging statistically indipendent extrinsic information between components has been extended to other concratenations of receiver elements.