Multiple Description Analog Joint Source-Channel Coding to Exploit the Diversity in Parallel Channels

The complexity and delay introduced by efficient digital coding strategies may be a barrier in some real-time communications. In this sense, these last years, joint source-channel coding schemes based on analog mappings have gained prominence precisely for their simplicity and their implicit low delay. In this work, analog mappings originally designed for point-to-point communications are adapted to the case of parallel channels by following the multiple description strategy traditionally used in source coding. In principle, the coding scheme is designed to transmit over parallel AWGN on-off channels, which are characterized by the possibility of having failures. We also show that our scheme performs satisfactorily over slow Rayleigh fading parallel channels.