An Extension to Source-Channel Coding of Correlated Gaussian Sources for a Fading GMAC Using TCVQ

Separate source-channel (SSC) coding is known to be sub-optimal for communicating correlated Gaussian sources over fading Gaussian multiple-access channel (GMAC). Consid-ering the two-to-one GMAC with Rayleigh block fading and no transmitter-side channel-state information (CSI), a recent work demonstrated a simple fixed-rate joint source-channel (JSC) coding scheme referred to as source-channel trellis coded vector quantization (SC- TCVQ). This paper presents a new extension to SC- TCVQ which is shown to further improve performance with only a minor increase in encoder complexity. New results are presented which show that this finite block-length JSC coding scheme can beat the asymptotic performance upper bound of SSC coding.