Distributed Source Coding Under Noisy Transmission Environments

Distributed source coding (DSC) has been attracting more and more research interests recently, particularly for mobile wireless applications. However, most existing DSC schemes assume that the coded information is transmitted error free to the decoder end. In this paper, we report our latest investigations on distributed source coding under noisy transmission environments. It is expected that these investigations provide useful guidelines for practical DSC system design when the transmission is actually not error free. Especially, many current schemes in DSC adopted the channel coding principles to accomplish the source coding tasks. We shall illustrate that the channel coding-based DSC schemes possess some inherent noise combating capability to recover possible channel errors under noisy transmission environments. Specifically, we shall report the investigations of Turbo DSC under various environments: error free, noisy transmission with additional forward error correction (FEC) and noisy transmission without FEC. Our experimental results show that, with the same number of bits transmitted through noise channel, the unprotected Turbo DSC outperforms the FEC protected Turbo DSC.