Trellis-coded quantization designed for noisy channels

Trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) of memoryless sources is developed for transmission over a binary symmetric channel. The optimized TCQ coder can achieve essentially the same performance as Ayanoglu and Gray's (1987) unconstrained trellis coding optimized for the binary symmetric channel, but with a much lower implementation complexity for transmission rates above 1 b/sample. In most cases, the optimized TCQ coder also provides larger signal-to-noise ratio than Farvardin and Vaishampayan's (1991) channel-optimized vector quantization. Algorithms are developed for the joint design of trellis-coded quantization/modulation (TCQ/TCM). The jointly designed TCQ/TCM system outperforms the straightforward cascade of separately designed TCQ and TCM systems. The improvement is most significant at low channel signal-to-noise ratio. For a first-order Gauss-Markov source, the predictive TCQ/TCM performance can exceed that of optimum pulse amplitude modulation.>