Comparison between Analog Joint Source-Channel Coded and Digital BICM Systems

Recently, the use of analog joint source-channel coding for the transmission of data samples at high rates over AWGN channels has been proposed in the literature. Simulation results have shown that this analog scheme performs close to the theoretical limits for several source distributions and transmission rates. In this paper we study the performance of such a system in comparison with optimized capacity approaching digital Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation (BICM) schemes. We show that in practical situations the analog transmission performs better than the digital scheme with a much lower encoding and decoding complexity when considering Gaussian and Laplacian source distributions.