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Chapter 15
Joint Source and Channel Coding
15.1 Introduction
The end-to-end performance of wireless communications depends on the effective
processing in both the source and the channel. In practical communications systems,
source coding is handled at the application layer, mostly for multimedia contents, and
channel coding is most commonly performed at the physical layer (PHY). Guided
by Shannon’s separation principle, source coding and channel coding are usually ac-
complished independently. Hence, an implicit assumption at PHY is that the data
to be transmitted are compressed source without redundancies. Contrary to this as-
sumption, numerous applications inject uncompressed data into the network (e.g.,
e-mails, Web pages, and uncompressed ...