Joint speech codec parameter and channel decoding of parameter individual block codes (PIBC)

In digital mobile speech transmission usually the most important (class la) bits provided by the speech coding scheme are protected by a CRC for error detection. As a consequence all parameters spanned by the class la bits have to be marked at the receiver either as reliable or as unreliable. In contrast to this somewhat coarse approach we propose the usage of what we call parameter individual block codes (PIBC) for the most important codec parameters. This allows joint speech codec parameter and PIBC decoding taking advantage of the error concealing properties of soft-bit speech decoding.