Distributed Joint Source-Channel Coding Using Unequal Error Protection LDPC Codes

This paper presents a general approach to designing distributed joint source channel (DJSC) codes with arbitrary rates for communication of a pair of correlated binary sources over noisy channels. In this approach, both distributed compression and channel error correction are simultaneously achieved by transmitting, for each source, a fraction of the information bits together with the parity bits of a systematic channel code. This approach is shown to be asymptotically optimal, i.e., any rate-pair in the achievable rate-region can be approached as the codeword length is increased. The practical realization of such a code requi res the design of a pair of channel codes with unequal error protection (UEP) properties determined by the inter-source correlation and the channel capacity available to each source. Towards this end, a linear programming based procedure for jointly optimizing the degree profiles of a pair of irregular LDPC codes to achieve the required UEP properties is presented. Experimental results obtained with both binary symmetric channels and binary-input Gaussian channels are presented, which demonstrate that the proposed UEP-DJSC codes can significantly outperform separate source-channel codes, as well as previously reported joint source-channel coding schemes, particularly for short codeword lengths.