Hybrid Digital-Analog Joint Source Channel Coding for Broadcast Multiresolution Communications

Multilayer coding represents an appealing solution for the broadcasting of common data when we want to ensure the receivers decode the signal with different distortion levels depending on the quality of the received signal. In addition, the combination of digital and analog techniques to encode the source data allows to solve the limitation of these approaches when they are applied separately. In this work, we consider a Hybrid Digital-Analog (HDA) multilayer system where the digital layers are employed to satisfy different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and an analog layer refines the estimates of the source symbols. The resulting scheme provides good performance for different expansion factors and number of layers, and it also presents good scaling for all SNR values.