Joint Source-Channel Coding Introduction and How It Can Help Ultra-Low Latency Communication

Rapidly growing market of interactive real-time video applications, such as Cloud Gaming, Virtual Desktop, Remote Operating and Metaverse imposes strong requirement on communication latency, which directly influences user experience. Low and ultra-low latency requirement down to tens or units of milliseconds may require re-consideration of architecture of communication systems traditionally adopted by the industry.

Historically, communication systems are designed based on separate source channel coding approach, which splits communication task on two independent steps: removing the redundant information by means of source codec (video, image, audio compression), and re-introducing it back by channel codec helping message reconstruction in presence of communication channel errors.

In contrast, joint source-channel coding (JSCC) considers reconstruction quality of delivered signal as a joint function of source coding distortions and transmission channel errors, which can be jointly optimized providing more robust communication experience under low latency constrain.