Futuristic requirements of mobile communication systems ask for discovering new possibilities and dimensions to enable ultrafast and reliable communication. This work relates to the advancements in jointly decoded iterative multimedia communication systems for the H.264 source standard. The beneficial technique of Over-Complete Mapping (OCM) is utilized for introducing redundancy in the highly compressed source encoded video streams. Differential Space–Time Spreading (DSTS) is invoked along with Rate-3/4 Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) as intermediate encoder in the proposed three-stage setup. More specifically, the RSC encoder is beneficial in attaining the iterative gain as it divides the decoder into two parts. The DSTS is invoked with the Sphere Packing (SP) modulation which is highly desirable for the non-coherent detection schemes without requiring any information from the channel. The proposed system comprises of three main components, namely OCM, Rate-3/4 RSC and SP modules, thus we call this as three-stage system. The iterative decoding enhances the Bit-Error Rate (BER) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) performances of the joint source-channel systems. Furthermore, to expeditiously predict the convergence pattern of the proposed three-stage iteratively decoded systems, EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart analysis is performed. Moreover, the effect of variations in the minimum Hamming distance ( $${d}_{H,min}$$ d H , m i n ) is observed for the proposed three-stage system. The $${{DSTS}-{SP}-{RSC}-{OCM}}_{[5 15]}$$ DSTS - SP - RSC - OCM [ 515 ] having $${d}_{H,min}=6$$ d H , m i n = 6 exhibits a gain of 20 dB against the benchmarker $${{DSTS}-{SP}-{RSC}-{OCM}}_{[2 6]}^{*}$$ DSTS - SP - RSC - OCM [ 26 ] ∗ with $${d}_{H,min}=1$$ d H , m i n = 1 at the PSNR degradation point of 1 dB over a correlated Rayleigh fading channel.

The introduction of 5G with excessively high speeds and ever-advancing cellular device capabilities has increased the demand for high data rate wireless multimedia communication. Data compression, transmission robustness and error resilience are introduced to meet the increased demands of high data rates of today. An innovative approach is to come up with a unique setup of source bit codes (SBCs) that ensure the convergence and joint source-channel coding (JSCC) correspondingly results in lower bit error ratio (BER). The soft-bit assisted source and channel codes are optimized jointly for optimum convergence. Source bit codes assisted by iterative detection are used with a rate-1 precoder for performance evaluation of the above mentioned scheme of transmitting sata-partitioned (DP) H.264/AVC frames from source through a narrowband correlated Rayleigh fading channel. A novel approach of using sphere packing (SP) modulation aided differential space time spreading (DSTS) in combination with SBC is designed for the video transmission to cope with channel fading. Furthermore, the effects of SBC with different hamming distances $d_{(H,min)}$ but similar coding rates is explored on objective video quality such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and also the overall bit error ratio (BER). EXtrinsic Information Transfer Charts (EXIT) are used for analysis of the convergence behavior of SBC and its iterative scheme. Specifically, the experiments exhibit that the proposed scheme of error protection of SBC $d_{(H,min)}$ = 6 outperforms the SBCs having same code rate, but with $d_{(H,min)}$ = 3 by 3 dB with PSNR degradation of 1 dB. Furthermore, simulation results show that a gain of 27 dB $E_b/N_0$ is achieved with SBC having code rate 1/3 compared to the benchmark Rate-1 SBC codes.