Energy-limited Joint Source--Channel Coding via Analog Pulse Position Modulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an energy-efficient joint source-channel coding scheme using analog pulse position modulation that achieves near-optimal distortion decay over infinite-bandwidth Gaussian channels, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel analog PPM-based coding scheme that attains the decay bounds of distortion, advancing the state-of-the-art in energy-limited communication.

Findings

Scheme achieves exponential and polynomial decay of distortion

Outperforms existing coding techniques in simulations

Attains Burnashev's outer bound for distortion decay

Abstract

We study the problem of transmitting a source sample with minimum distortion over an infinite-bandwidth additive white Gaussian noise channel under an energy constraint. To that end, we construct a joint source--channel coding scheme using analog pulse position modulation (PPM) and bound its quadratic distortion. We show that this scheme outperforms existing techniques since its quadratic distortion attains both the exponential and polynomial decay orders of Burnashev's outer bound. We supplement our theoretical results with numerical simulations and comparisons to existing schemes.