Hybrid Digital-Analog Transmission Systems: Design and Evaluation

During the last 25 years, most of the communication systems have been converted to purely digital technology, although the transmitted content mostly is analog by nature. The principal advantages of digital communication are compression by source encoding, bit error protection by channel coding and robust transmission over noisy channels by appropriate modulation. Digital systems are usually designed for worst case channel conditions. However, often the channel quality is much better, which is not reflected in an improved end-to-end transmission quality due to inevitable quantization noise produced by the source encoder. In this thesis, the focus is set on systems which: are not purely digital anymore benefit from increasing channel qualities and avoid the saturation effect using discrete-time, continuous-amplitude techniques. In the first part, purely analog, i.e., discrete-time and continuous-amplitude transmission systems are considered with linear or nonlinear components. Theoretical performance limits are discussed and a new rate-distortion upper bound is derived which can be evaluated semi-analytically. The performance of linear transmission systems is derived analytically while simulations assess several nonlinear systems including the famous Archimedes spiral. A new class of nonlinear discrete-time analog coding systems, i.e., the Analog Modulo Block Codes (AMBCs) is developed. One important observation is that nonlinear discrete-time, continuous-amplitude systems can be decomposed into a discrete and a continuous-amplitudes part. The considered systems exhibit a considerable gap to capacity but they all circumvent the saturation effect due to the continuous-amplitude components. In the main part of the thesis, these findings are turned into a design principle. Hybrid Digital-Analog (HDA) transmission systems consist of separate digital and analog branches while each is constructed independently. By combining both worlds digital and continuous-amplitude transmission new concepts emerge which fuse their advantages: capacity achieving performance in the digital branch with a huge variety of conventional digital codes plus avoiding the saturation effect in the analog branch. The performance of HDA systems is assessed theoretically as well as by simulations. These Hybrid Digital-Analog (HDA) transmission systems outperform both purely digital and continuous-amplitude concepts. HDA transmission is an attractive solution for wireless systems such as microphones, loudspeakers or distributed sensors.