Combined Huffman and trellis decoders for data transmission

The principles of a new scheme for combining the source and channel coding applicable to digital communication systems is described. At the transmitter the concatenation of a source encoder with a channel encoder is considered. At the receiver, source and channel decoding are combined into a single decoding unit. This unit controls the transmission errors caused by the channel noise that error free data can be transferred to the user. The combining technique employing variable-length Huffman codes for source coding and variable rate convolutional codes for channel coding is described, together with its performance over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. It is shown that combining source and channel coding is particularly applicable to digital communication systems where the effect of noise is severe, and thus reduces the overall complexity of the system