Distributed Joint Source Coding and Trellis Coded Modulation for Symbol-Based Markov Sources

A distributed joint source-channel coding scheme based on a unity-rate code (URC) assisted trellis coded modulation (TCM) is proposed, which exploits the spatiotemporal correlation of symbol-based sources. More specifically, asymmetric distributed source coding of two spatially correlated Markov sources is considered, where one of the sources is assumed to be perfectly decoded and to be available at the receiver of the other source as side information. In order to exploit the temporal correlation statistics, an iterative decoding process exchanging extrinsic information between the amalgamated URC-assisted TCM and a soft-symbol source decoder employing a modified symbol-based maximum a posteriori algorithm is invoked. Furthermore, the Slepian-Wolf (SW) bound of symbol-based sources having spatiotemporal correlation is derived and the benefits of exploiting the spatiotemporal correlation using the proposed coding scheme are demonstrated by our extrinsic information transfer chart analysis. It is shown from our simulation results that upon exploiting the spatiotemporal correlation of the sources, the proposed coding scheme is capable of operating within 0.02 b of the SW bound.