The design of joint source and channel trellis waveform coders

The generalized Lloyd algorithm is applied to the design of joint source and channel trellis waveform coders to encode discrete-time continuous-amplitude stationary and ergodic sources operating over discrete memoryless noisy channels. Experimental results are provided for independent and autoregressive Gaussian sources, binary symmetric channels, and absolute error and squared error distortion measures. Performance of the joint codes is compared with the tandem combination of a trellis source code and a trellis channel code on the independent Gaussian source using the squared error distortion measure operating over an additive white Gaussian noise channel. It is observed that the jointly optimized codes achieve performance close to or better than that of separately optimized tandem codes of the same constraint length. Performance improvement via a predictive joint source and channel trellis code is demonstrated for the autoregressive Gaussian source using the squared error distortion measure.