Radio spectrum has become a scarce and priced resource due to the rapid growth of wireless networks. However, recent surveys conducted by the FCC indicate that a large part of the allotted frequency spectrum lies unused. Cognitive radio systems, built on the software defined radios, allow the efficient usage of these unused frequency spectrum. Cognitive radio systems can be modeled as a multiple access channel in which certain users have the priority (primary users) while others (cognitive or secondary users) are allowed to access the channels without causing any interference to the primary users. However a secondary user’s transmissions not only encounter high levels of uncertainty and variability in the number of channels available to them, but they also suffer data losses if a primary user activity occurs. Under such rigid constraints, the reliable transmission of real time multimedia of a secondary user with an acceptable quality of service becomes challenging. Multimedia transmission in a cognitive system requires channel adaptive source and channel coding schemes. In order to address this problem, this thesis investigates and develops a novel joint source-channel coding (JSCC) approach. The proposed JSCC allows the dynamic generation of codes, which minimizes the end-to-end distortion. This JSCC is based on quantized frame expansions to introduce redundancy into transmitted data. An algorithm has been developed to determine the optimal trade-off between redundancy and quantization rate, under a constraint on channel capacity. The proposed approach does not require the communication of any overhead data between the transmitter and receiver. When compared to codes commonly used to deal with packet losses, simulation results indicate that the proposed JSCC can achieve lower distortion for secondary user’s transmissions in cognitive radio systems.