Vector quantization with transmission energy allocation for time-varying channels

This work is concerned with the problem of designing robust, vector quantizer (VQ)-based communication systems for operation over time-varying Gaussian channels. Transmission energy allocation to VQ codeword bits, according to their error sensitivities, is a powerful tool for improving robustness to channel noise. The power of this technique can be further enhanced by appropriately combining it with index assignment methods. We pose the corresponding joint optimization problem and suggest a simple iterative algorithm for finding a locally optimal solution. The susceptibility of the solution to poor local minima is significantly reduced by an enhanced version of the algorithm which invokes the method of noisy channel relaxation whereby the VQ system is optimized while gradually decreasing the assumed level of channel noise. In a series of experiments, the resulting combined technique is shown to outperform standard pseudo-Gray coding by up to 3.5 dB and to exhibit graceful degradation at mismatched channel conditions. Finally, we extend these ideas to the case where both the transmitter and the receiver have information on the current state of a time-varying channel. The proposed method is based on switched encoding and adaptive decoding. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves close to optimal performance.