Advances in Visual Data Compression and Communication

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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 ...