Toward a Unified Framework for Modeling and Analysis of Diversity in Joint Source-Channel Coding

The study of Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) systems faces one major challenge in obtaining an analytical expression for the function that links end-to-end distortion with channel signal-to-noise ratio, the D-SNR curve. In this paper, for certain multimedia systems using practical source and channel codes in a JSCC bit rate allocation design, the D-SNR curve is shown to be well approximated by a set of carefully selected points where the relative contribution of channel errors to end-to-end distortion is small. This approach has the potential advantage that it could be applied to represent performance of many practical systems using JSCC bit rate allocation for which it is shown that the D-SNR function is approximately linear in log-log scales.