Joint source-channel coding via hybrid coding

A new analog-digital hybrid coding architecture for joint source-channel coding is proposed. The encoder generates a channel input by a symbol-by-symbol mapping of the observed (analog) source and its (digital) compression codeword, while the decoder reconstructs the source by a symbol-by-symbol mapping of the (analog) channel output and the decoded (digital) compression codeword from it. When applied to the problem of lossy communication of sources over the two-user discrete memoryless interference channel, this hybrid coding scheme achieves the best known performance and recovers as special cases several previous results on lossless and lossy communication over single hop networks.