English

The Dispersion of Joint Source-Channel Coding

Information Theory 2011-12-08 v2 math.IT

Abstract

In this work we investigate the behavior of the distortion threshold that can be guaranteed in joint source-channel coding, to within a prescribed excess-distortion probability. We show that the gap between this threshold and the optimal average distortion is governed by a constant that we call the joint source-channel dispersion. This constant can be easily computed, since it is the sum of the source and channel dispersions, previously derived. The resulting performance is shown to be better than that of any separation-based scheme. For the proof, we use unequal error protection channel coding, thus we also evaluate the dispersion of that setting.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.6310,
  title  = {The Dispersion of Joint Source-Channel Coding},
  author = {Da Wang and Amir Ingber and Yuval Kochman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.6310},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

Extended version of work presented in the 2011 Allerton conference

R2 v1 2026-06-21T19:12:04.597Z