1. A method for jointly designing a transmitter pulse-shaping filter and a receiver pulse-shaping filter having respective filter coefficients, comprising: defining one or more performance-related variables based on at least some of the filter coefficients of the transmitter and receiver pulse-shaping filters; setting one or more constraints applicable to one or more of the filter coefficients and variables; evaluating a cost function defined over the variables; and jointly calculating optimized filter coefficient values of the transmitter and receiver pulse-shaping filters by applying an optimization process to the cost function while meeting the one or more constraints wherein the one or more performance-related variables comprise at least one variable type selected from a group of types consisting of a peak to average ratio (PAR) at an output of a transmitter comprising the transmitter pulse-shaping filter, an adjacent channel interference (ACI) at an output of the receiver pulse-shaping filter, a residual self inter-symbol interference (SISI) at the output of the receiver pulse-shaping filter, a signal to noise ratio (SNR) degradation caused by a deviation from a matched filter response between the transmitter and receiver pulse-shaping filters, a distance from a spectral mask defined for the transmitter comprising the transmitter pulse-shaping filter, a normalized mean square error (NMSE) caused by a nonlinear noise floor in at least one of the transmitter comprising the transmitter pulse-shaping filter and a receiver comprising the receiver pulse-shaping filter, a symbol rate of the transmitter comprising the transmitter pulse-shaping filter and the receiver comprising the receiver pulse-shaping filter, and a variable indicative of hardware-related distortion in at least one of the transmitter comprising the transmitter pulse-shaping filter and the receiver comprising the receiver pulse-shaping filter.