Summary: WHEN DOES JOINT SOURCE­CHANNEL CODING OUTPERFORM
TANDEM CODING FOR SYSTEMS WITH MARKOVIAN MEMORY ?
Yangfan Zhong, Fady Alajaji and L. Lorne Campbell
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada
fyangfan, fady, campblllg@mast.queensu.ca
ABSTRACT
In this work, we explore the merits of joint source­channel
coding (JSCC) versus traditional tandem coding, which con­
sists of separately performing and concatenating source and
channel coding, from the point of view of the error exponent
(or reliability function). For a communication system with
a discrete stationary ergodic Markov (SEM) source Q and
a discrete channel W with additive SEM noise, we present
sufficient conditions under which the JSCC error exponent
EJ(Q; W) strictly outperforms the tandem coding error ex­
ponent ET (Q; W). We observe that these conditions are
satisfied by a large class of SEM source­channel pairs. Nu­
merical examples also indicate that EJ(Q; W) can be nearly
twice as large as ET (Q; W) for many source­channel pairs

Source: Alajaji, Fady - Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen's University (Kingston)
Linder, Tamás - Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen's University (Kingston)

Collections: Engineering