This book provides the first comprehensive and easy-to-read discussion of joint source-channel encoding and decoding for source signals with continuous amplitudes. It is a state-of-the-art presentation of this exciting, thriving field of research, making pioneering contributions to the new concept of source-adaptive modulation.

The book starts with the basic theory and the motivation for a joint realization of source and channel coding. Specialized chapters deal with practically relevant scenarios such as iterative source-channel decoding and its optimization for a given encoder, and also improved encoder designs by channel-adaptive quantization or source-adaptive modulation.

Although Information Theory is not the main topic of the book — in fact, the concept of joint source-channel coding is contradictory to the classical system design motivated by a questionable practical interpretation of the separation theorem — this theory still provides the ultimate performance limits for any practical system, whether it uses joint source-channel coding or not. Therefore, the theoretical limits are presented in a self-contained appendix, which is a useful reference also for those not directly interested in the main topic of this book.

Contents:

• Joint Source-Channel Coding: An Overview
• Joint Source-Channel Decoding
• Channel-Adaptive Scaled Vector Quantization
• Index Assignments for Multiple Descriptions Vector Quantizers
• Source-Adaptive Modulation
• Source-Adaptive Power Allocation
• Appendices:
• Theoretical Performance Limits
• Optimal Decoder for a Given Encoder
• Symbol Error Probabilities for M-PSK
• Derivative of the Expected Distortion for SAM