Operational rate-distortion design for joint source-channel coding over noisy channels

An optimal joint source-channel coding (OJSCC) scheme is developed for memoryless generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) sources encoding and transmission over noisy channels. Two channel models are studied, binary symmetric channels (BSC) for memoryless channels and Gilbert-Elliott channels (GEC) for bursty channels. The operational rate-distortion (R-D) function we adopted represents an end-to-end error measurement that includes errors due to both quantization and channel noise. In particular, we are able to incorporate both the channel transition probability and channel bit error rate in the case of bursty channels. With the operational R-D function, we can achieve an optimum tradeoff between source coding accuracy and channel error protection under a fixed transmission rate. Experiments show that for BSC, OJSCC outperforms the best channel optimized scalar quantization (COSQ) system at high bit rate constraint; while for GEC, we show that the optimal design achieves better performance than the popular designs based on either the average BER or the worst BER.