A Tight Bound on the Performance of a Minimal-Delay Joint Source-Channel Coding Scheme

TL;DR

This paper establishes a tight lower bound on the asymptotic mean squared error for a minimal-delay joint source-channel coding scheme transmitting analog sources over Gaussian channels, confirming the optimality of a previously studied strategy.

Contribution

It derives a tight lower bound on performance, showing the optimality of a simple quantization-based transmission scheme for minimal-delay communication.

Findings

Lower bound matches the performance of a known suboptimal decoder

The bound is tight, confirming the scheme's optimality

Provides insights into minimal-delay joint source-channel coding performance

Abstract

An analog source is to be transmitted across a Gaussian channel in more than one channel use per source symbol. This paper derives a lower bound on the asymptotic mean squared error for a strategy that consists of repeatedly quantizing the source, transmitting the quantizer outputs in the first channel uses, and sending the remaining quantization error uncoded in the last channel use. The bound coincides with the performance achieved by a suboptimal decoder studied by the authors in a previous paper, thereby establishing that the bound is tight.