Distributed joint source and channel code with correlated information sources

In this paper, a new distributed joint source-channel code (DJSCC) is proposed for a communication network with multiple correlated information sources. The DJSCC is performed by puncturing the information bits of a linear block code but leaving the parity bits intact, given the fact that the correlation among the parity bits is usually much lower compared to the corresponding information bits. In recognition of the different roles of the information and parity bits in the DJSCC scheme, we propose to allocate unequal amounts of energy per bit to these two different types of bits. The unequal energy allocation leads to significant performance gains over conventional equal energy transmissions. At the receiver, the sources are jointly decoded with the iterative message passing algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve considerable performance gains over conventional schemes.