Hybrid Coding for Gaussian Broadcast Channels with Gaussian Sources

Abstract: This paper considers a degraded Gaussian broadcast channel over which Gaussian sources are to be communicated. When the sources are independent, this paper shows that hybrid coding achieves the optimal distortion region, the same as that of separate source and channel coding. It also shows that uncoded transmission is not optimal for this setting. For correlated sources, the paper shows that a hybrid coding strategy has a better distortion region than separate source-channel coding below a certain signal to noise ratio threshold. Thus, hybrid coding is a good choice for Gaussian broadcast channels with correlated Gaussian sources.