To code or not to code: lossy source-channel communication revisited

• Published in: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 49, num. 5, p. 1147-1158
• Publication date: 2003

What makes a source–channel communication system optimal? It is shown that in order to achieve an optimal cost–distortion tradeoff, the source and the channel have to be matched in a probabilistic sense. The match (or lack of it) involves the source distribution, the distortion measure, the channel conditional distribution, and the channel input cost func- tion. Closed-form necessary and sufficient expressions relating the above entities are given. This generalizes both the separa- tion-based approach as well as the two well-known examples of optimal uncoded communication. The condition of probabilistic matching is extended to certain nonergodic and multiuser scenarios. This leads to a result on op- timal single-source broadcast communication.

Keywords: NCCR-MICS/CL1 ; NCCR-MICS ; joint source-channel coding ; uncoded transmission ; separation theorem ; single-letter codes ; single-source broadcast

Reference

• LCAV-ARTICLE-2003-003
• doi:10.1109/TIT.2003.810631
• View record in Web of Science

Record created on 2005-04-18, modified on 2012-03-21