EXIT-Chart Aided 3-Stage Concatenated Ultra-WideBand Time-Hopping Spread-Spectrum Impulse Radio Design

A serially concatenated and iteratively decoded Irregular Variable Length Coding (IrVLC) scheme is amalgamated with a unity-rate precoded Time-Hopping (TH) Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) aided Ultra-Wide Bandwidth (UWB) SpreadSpectrum (SS) impulse radio design. The proposed design is capable of operating at low Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNR) in Nakagami-m fading channels contaminated by Partial Band Noise Jamming (PBNJ) as a benefit of lossless IrVLC joint source and channel coding. Although this scheme may be readily used for lossless video or audio compression for example, we only used it here for lossless near-capacity data transmission. A number of component Variable Length Coding (VLC) codebooks having different coding rates are utilized by the IrVLC scheme for encoding specific fractions of the input source symbol stream. EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts are used to appropriately select these fractions in order to shape the inverted EXIT curve of the IrVLC and hence to match that of the inner decoder, which allows us to achieve an infinitesimally low Bit Error Ratio (BER) at near-capacity SNR values.