  We present a joint message passing approach that combines belief propagation
and the mean field approximation. Our analysis is based on the region-based
free energy approximation method proposed by Yedidia et al. We show that the
message passing fixed-point equations obtained with this combination correspond
to stationary points of a constrained region-based free energy approximation.
Moreover, we present a convergent implementation of these message passing
fixedpoint equations provided that the underlying factor graph fulfills certain
technical conditions. In addition, we show how to include hard constraints in
the part of the factor graph corresponding to belief propagation. Finally, we
demonstrate an application of our method to iterative channel estimation and
decoding in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system.
