Optimal and robust communication for a uniform source

A communication system based on the joint source-channel coding principle is proposed, where a fixed-rate source encoder is used to avoid the error propagation effect as experienced when variable length coding is used and thus gain system robustness. An explicit expression of the mean square error (MSE) distortion of the system for a uniform source is derived. We provide an algorithm to achieve the optimal solution by investigating the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition. The numerical results show that the overall performance of the proposed system is close to the performance of the entropy coded scalar quantiser (ECSQ) system established by A. Gyo-rgy and T. Under for almost all rate region. A 0.176-bits-per-sample performance loss is found for the worst case by comparing our considered system and ECSQ system. An observation resembling the finding by V. Goya1 et al. is that in the low rate region, there exist certain regimes in which the proposed system outperforms the ECSQ system. Finally, the proposed system outperforms the equal rate system with a large margin.