An error control scheme for transmission of vector quantization data over noisy channels

This paper presents an error control scheme for transmitting vector-quantized data over noisy channels. First, we review a self-organizing feature map (SOFM) based approach to construct the mapping from the codebook of the quantizer to the channel signal set of the communication system. This approach is robust with respect to channel noise even if we do not use any error control scheme in the communication system. Afterwards, a new trellis type quantizer, namely, the trellis coded Kohonen (1984) map (TCKM), is presented. The design process of the TCKM, which is based on the neighborhood structure of SOFMs, is simpler than that of conventional trellis coded vector quantizers (TCVQs). Simulation results show that the performance of TCKMs is comparable with that of TCVQs. Last, we introduce the error control scheme based on the concepts of the above two applications of SOFMs. Simulation results show that the proposed error control scheme is more robust with respect to channel noise. The advantage of our approaches mentioned above is that the design processes of transmission systems are predefined before the construction of the codebook. Thus, different codebooks with the same neighborhood structure can share the same design.