Abstract-I. MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND Shannon's source-channel separation principle [1] states that under idealised, but only asymptotically valid conditions source coding and channel coding schemes may be designed independently. However, in reality the source codes designed without taking into account the presence of channel decoding errors tend to have a poor performance, owing to the finite length, finite complexity source and channel codes employed. In a high compression source codec a low number of erroneous bits in an entropy coded sequence typically is mapped to a high video distortion in the reconstructed sequence. This results in low target error rate requirements for channel coding, in order to prevent the source coded video from becoming unduly impaired. In such a situation, joint source-channel decoding (JSCD) results in substantial performance improvements at a given channel coding rate, by exploiting any residual redundancy inherent in the resultant bit-stream after source coding. In recent years, the turbo-principle was extended to JSCD by invoking iterative source-channel decoding (ISCD) by iteratively exchanging extrinsic information between two or more concatenated codes. In [2,3], it was revealed that ISCD schemes indeed exhibit superior bit-error correction capability incomparison to those of the non-iterative schemes. However, the number of useful iterations is typically limited to two or three iterations [4,5] due to the limited residual redundancy left in the source coded stream. In [4], it was shown that the achievable ISCD performance can be improved by introducing artificial redundancy in the source coded stream. Therefore, in our proposed scheme we advocate a novel class of short block codes [6] invoked, in order to improve the attainable iterative decoding performance. A turbo-detected multidimensional Sphere Packing (SP) modulation scheme using two transmit antennas combined with Differentially encoded Space-Time Spreading (DSTS) is presented in [7]. DSTS is a non-coherent MIMO scheme capable of providing a diversity gain, while attaining no multiplexing gain for the case of two transmit antennas and a throughput loss in the four transmit antennas case compared to a single transmit antenna system. However, throughput improvements can be achieved using a multi-layer MIMO structure designed for achieving a multiplexing gain, which is known as the vertical bell labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) scheme [8]. More explicitly, the advantage of V-BLAST is that it is capable of providing an increased effective bit-rate without any increase in the transmitted power or in the system's bandwidth. By contrast, a high transmit diversity gain can be achieved using Alamouti's low-complexity spacetime code (STC) [9]. On the other hand, beamforming [10] provides an effective technique of reducing the multiple-access interference (MAI), where the antenna gain is increased in the direction of the target user, while reducing the gain towards the interfering users. In order to combine the benefits of the ...