[IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, September 1997, pp. 1412-1424]
Tradeoff Between Source and Channel Coding
Bertrand Hochwald and Kenneth Zeger
Abstract
A fundamental problem in the transmission of analog information across a
noisy discrete channel is the choice of channel code rate that optimally
allocates the available transmission rate between lossy source coding and
block channel coding. We establish tight bounds on the channel code rate
that minimizes the average distortion of a vector quantizer cascaded with a
channel coder and a binary symmetric channel. Analytic expressions are
derived in two cases of interest: small bit error probability and arbitrary
source vector dimension; arbitrary bit error probability and large source
vector dimension. We demonstrate that the optimal channel code rate is
often substantially smaller than the channel capacity, and obtain a
noisy-channel version of the Zador high-resolution distortion formula.