Joint source-channel (De-)coding for mobile communications

Real world source coding algorithms usually leave a certain amount of redundancy within the coded bit stream. Shannon already mentioned that this redundancy can be exploited at the receiver side to achieve a higher robustness against channel errors. In this paper, we show how joint source-channel decoding can be performed in a way that is applicable to any mobile communication system standard. Considerable gains in terms of bit error rate or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are possible dependent on the amount of redundancy. However, an even better performance can be achieved by changing also the transmitter sided source and channel encoders. We propose an encoding concept employing low-dimensional quantization. Keeping the gross bit rate as well as the clean channel quality the same, it decreases the complexity of the source encoder and the decoder significantly. Finally, we give an application of our methods to spectral coefficient coding in speech transmission over a Rayleigh fading channel resulting in channel SNR gains of about 2 dB as compared to state-of-the-art (de-)coding and bad frame handling methods.