In the transmission of vector quantized data, the vector quantizer and
the communication system are usually designed separately. With such a
n approach, the channel noise results in significant degradations in t
he performance of the vector quantizer, To solve this problem, we shou
ld properly create the mapping from the codebook of the quantizer to t
he channel signal set of the communication system. This paper proposes
a new approach to construct such a mapping based on the ordering prop
erty of the self-organizing feature map (SOFM), We use the neighborhoo
d structure of the SOFM and the neighborhood structure of the channel
signal set to construct the mapping, Simulation results confirm that t
he proposed approach is robust with respect to channel noise.