Distributed Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding with Decoder-Only Side Information

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural network-based joint source-channel coding scheme for low-latency image transmission over noisy channels with receiver-only side information, outperforming traditional methods especially at low SNRs and small bandwidth ratios.

Contribution

A novel neural network architecture that effectively incorporates receiver-only side information into joint source-channel coding for improved image transmission performance.

Findings

Enhanced performance at low SNRs and small bandwidth ratios

Outperforms conventional separation-based schemes in finite blocklength regimes

Provides a practical, data-driven approach with publicly available source code

Abstract

We consider low-latency image transmission over a noisy wireless channel when correlated side information is present only at the receiver side (the Wyner-Ziv scenario). In particular, we are interested in developing practical schemes using a data-driven joint source-channel coding (JSCC) approach, which has been previously shown to outperform conventional separation-based approaches in the practical finite blocklength regimes, and to provide graceful degradation with channel quality. We propose a novel neural network architecture that incorporates the decoder-only side information at multiple stages at the receiver side. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method succeeds in integrating the side information, yielding improved performance at all channel conditions in terms of the various quality measures considered here, especially at low channel signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and small bandwidth ratios (BRs). We have made the source code of the proposed method public to enable further research, and the reproducibility of the results.