Concatenated Joint Source–Channel Coding

The most straightforward approach to joint source–channel coding (JSCC) is to keep the source and channel coding blocks as two separate components that are jointly configured. This chapter discusses the configuration, design, and performance of concatenated JSCC schemes. With concatenated JSCC, the main design goal is to jointly allocate the source and channel coding rates. For simplicity, the chapter considers that the channel is additive white Gaussian noise. The design goal is to jointly allocate source and channel coding rates for a given channel signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR). Characterizing the performance of concatenated JSCC means finding expressions for the D‐SNR curve, as this represents the solution to the design problem. Due to its simplicity, concatenated JSCC can be used in many applications. The chapter focuses on their use in a direct sequence code‐division multiple access system.