The paper “Multi-Class Source-Channel Coding” by  I. E. Bocharova, A. Guillen i Fabregas, B. D. Kudryashov, A. Martinez, A. Tauste Campo and G. Vazquez-Vilar has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

This paper studies an almost-lossless source-channel coding scheme in which source messages are assigned to different classes and encoded with a channel code that depends on the class index. The code performance is analyzed by means of random-coding error exponents and validated by simulation of a low-complexity implementation using existing source and channel codes. While each class code can be seen as a concatenation of a source code and a channel code, the overall performance improves on that of separate source-channel coding and approaches that of joint source-channel coding when the number of classes increases.