Comparing Different Transmission Strategies Using Turbo Codes for Nonuniform Memoryless Sources

Nonuniform sources can be found in real world applications as uncompressed speech, text and medical images. In this paper we compare the performance of three different methods for the transmission of such sources over AWGN and Rayleigh channels. One of the methods is the classical one considering separation between source and channel coding. The two other methods are based on source-controlled channel decoding, where data is not compressed prior to transmission and redundancy is exploited at receiver. The three methods make use of turbo codes as the channel code. Simulation results show that, in some cases and in terms of bit error rate, it may be more advantageous not to compress data prior to transmission.