  A new approach to joint source-channel coding is presented in the context of
communicating correlated sources over multiple access channels. Similar to the
separation architecture, the joint source-channel coding system architecture in
this approach is modular, whereby the source encoding and channel decoding
operations are decoupled. However, unlike the separation architecture, the same
codeword is used for both source coding and channel coding, which allows the
resulting hybrid coding scheme to achieve the performance of the best known
joint source-channel coding schemes. Applications of the proposed architecture
to relay communication are also discussed.
