Tradeoff between source and channel coding

A fundamental problem in the transmission of analog information across a noisy discrete channel is the choice of channel code rate that optimally allocates the available transmission rate between lossy source coding and block channel coding. We establish tight bounds on the channel code rate that minimizes the average distortion of a vector quantizer cascaded with a channel coder and a binary-symmetric channel. Analytic expressions are derived in two cases of interest: small bit-error probability and arbitrary source vector dimension; arbitrary bit-error probability and large source vector dimension. We demonstrate that the optimal channel code rate is often substantially smaller than the channel capacity, and obtain a noisy-channel version of the Zador high-resolution distortion formula.