Joint design of vector quantizers and RCPC channel codes for Rayleigh fading channels

We study the performance of joint source and channel codes designed to minimize end-to-end distortion over a Rayleigh fading channel. We consider two joint code designs. The first joint code uses a sequential design: a standard vector quantizer (VQ) source code is designed for a perfect channel (noiseless and distortionless) and then an RCPC channel code is optimized relative to the VQ and the channel statistics. The second design jointly optimizes a channel optimized VQ (COVQ) and an RCPC channel code through an iterative design process. We consider both hard-decision and soft-decision decoding for the channel codes. In both designs the bit allocation between the source and channel codes is optimized. At this optimal bit allocation, the performance of the iterative joint design and the simpler sequential design are nearly the same over the range of SNR values that we considered. Both code designs outperform standard COVQ and by up to 6 dB, and this performance improvement is most pronounced at low SNRs.