A joint source/channel coder design

The situation in which there is residual redundancy at the source coder output is examined. It has previously been shown that this residual redundancy can be used to provide error correction without a channel encoder. This approach is extended to conventional source coder/convolutional coder combinations. A design for nonbinary encoders for this situation is developed. It is shown through simulation results that the proposed systems consistently outperform conventional source-channel coder pairs with gains of greater than 10 dB at high probability of error