When fewer than 24 bits are available at the end of the data being encoded, zero bits are added (on the right) to form an integral number of 6-bit groups. Then, one or two = pad characters may be ...

That’s particularly true for encoding and decoding. “We really drive home the point that [decoding and encoding] are reciprocal, and they bootstrap each other,” Gillis said.

The experimental results show that the joint source-channel encoding/decoding scheme has obtained better performance than existing joint iterative decoding based on the bit-level super trellis.