On the complexity of joint source-channel decoding of markov sequences over memoryless channels
We investigate the complexity of joint source-channel maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding of a Markov sequence which is first encoded by a source code, then encoded by a convolutional code, and sent through a noisy memoryless channel. As established previously the MAP decoding can be performed by a Viterbi-like algorithm on a trellis whose states are triples of the states of the Markov source, the source coder and convolutional coder. The large size of the product space (in the order of K2N, where K is the number of source symbols and N is the number of states of the convolutional coder) appears to prohibit such a scheme. We show that in the case of finite impulse response convolutional codes the state space size can be reduced to O(K2 + NlogN), hence the decoding time becomes O(TK2 + TNlogN), where T is the length in bits of the decoded bitstream. We further show that an additional complexity reduction can be achieved when K > N, if the source satisfies a certain property, which is the case for a scalar quantized Gaussian-Markov source. This decrease becomes more significant as the tree structure of the source code is more unbalanced. The reduction factor ranges between O(K/N) (for a fixed-length source code) and O(K/logN) (for Golomb-Rice code)