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

Abstract: 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.