Hybrid digital-analog source-channel coding with adaptation

International audienceHybrid analog digital (HDA) architectures have been widely used in communication systems for analog source over discrete-time memoryless Gaussian channels. They employ a linear coding scheme in the analog parts, while considering separately the design of source and channel codes in the digital parts. To the best of our knowledge, none of the previous HDA schemes exploit the advantages of maintaining a joint source and channel coding design in the digital segment. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the analog parts on various outputs of the digital modules in a HDA communication system, and introduce a novel HDA architecture with adaptation for the digital parts. Such adaptation allows our system to exploit the joint effect of the analog components and the channel noise on outputs of the digital components, while simultaneously taking into consideration the unequal distribution of source code outputs. Our simulations illustrate that the proposed HDA system provides robust and graceful performance (on both bandwidth compression and expansion modes) for a wide range of channel condition