Using Simulated Annealing to Design of Digital Transmission Codes for Analog Sources

Conventional solutions to the problem of transmitting analog data over noisy digital channels separate the source coder and channel coder designs. Here, we show that simulated annealing is a promising tool for joint optimization of both the quantizer and the channel code. The technique is described with reference to a simple example using a scalar quantizer. It can be extended to cover vector quantization and a range of other applications.