Joint control of communication subsystems for low-energy image transmission

The paper presents a joint control method for low-energy image transmission. The proposed method is based on universal distortion-rate characteristics, which are predetermined characteristics of a source coder. This method relieves the computational cost of the joint optimization involving source coder, channel coder and modulation by separating the source coder and other communication subsystems. The results show that an average of 23% energy saving over the reference system can be achieved when targeting mid-quality of images (33 dB PSNR) under a fading channel when the fading figure is 3.