Hybrid Coding: An Interface for Joint Source-Channel Coding and Network Communication

A new approach to joint source–channel coding is presented in the context of communicating correlated sources over multiple access channels. Similar to the separation architecture, the joint source– channel coding system architecture in this approach is modular, whereby the source encoding and channel decoding operations are decoupled. However, unlike the separation architecture, the same codeword is used for both source coding and channel coding, which allows the resulting hybrid coding scheme to achieve the performance of the best known joint source–channel coding schemes. Applications of the proposed architecture to relay communication are also discussed. Index Terms Analog/digital coding, hybrid coding, joint source–channel coding, network information theory, relay networks. Paolo Minero is with the Department of Electrical Engineering of the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA (Email: [email protected]). Sung Hoon Lim was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, and is now with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Yongin-si, Gyeonggido, Korea (Email: [email protected]). Young-Han Kim is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego CA, 92093, USA (Email: [email protected]). This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Grant CCF-1117728. This work was presented in part at the 2010 Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing and at the 2011 International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2011). May 7, 2014 DRAFT 2