A Simplified Joint Source and Channel Coding System for Data Transmission over Fading Channel

The major challenge with multimedia communication lies in the demand for higher data rates with better quality of service and lower latency over the wireless channel. Multimedia content is usually source encoded with variable length codes (VLCs) for optimizing bandwidth utilization. VLCs, even though uniquely decodable, suffer from the problem of error propagation. A single bit error can cause an entire block of data to be decoded wrongly, because the ending of a codeword and the beginning of the next can no longer be determined correctly. Several joint source-channel coding (JSCC) techniques are studied in literature to have efficient source coding with resilience to channel errors, but such methods pose a prohibitively high computational complexity. A variant of JSCC for efficient transmission of information is presented in this paper. The information text is encoded by reversible VLC (RVLC) and corresponding to it, a header sequence is generated. Since the headers are critical in decoding a block, they are channel coded with convolution code to protect from errors. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing is used to provide high data rate communication and robustness to multipath fading. The performance of the system is analysed over Rayleigh fading channel in terms letter error rate (LER) and computational complexity. The proposed method is seen to provide a good LER performance at moderate to high signal to noise ratio, along with minimal computational complexity, when compared with the contemporary JSCC based schemes. Theoretical performance bounds for the error rate of the proposed system are also derived.