Universal Joint Source-Channel Coding Under an Input Energy Constraint

Abstract: We consider the problem of transmitting a source over an infinite-bandwidth additive white Gaussian noise channel with unknown noise level under an input energy constraint. We construct a universal scheme that uses modulo-lattice modulation with multiple layers; for each layer, we employ either analog linear modulation or analog pulse position modulation (PPM). We show that the designed scheme with linear layers requires less energy compared to existing solutions to achieve the same quadratically increasing distortion profile with the noise level; replacing the linear layers with PPM layers offers an additional improvement.