Analog Joint Source-Channel Coding for MIMO-OFDM Systems

Analog Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) has been shown to approach the optimal distortion-cost tradeoff when transmitting over AWGN channels. In this work we consider analog JSCC over frequency-selective channels using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and multiple antennas at transmission and/or reception, i.e. using a MIMO-OFDM system. Due to its high complexity, optimal MMSE analog JSCC decoding is infeasible in MIMO-OFDM systems and a practical two-stage decoding approach made up of an MMSE estimator followed by a Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoder is proposed instead. Three different alternatives for system optimization are considered: non-adaptive coding, adaptive coding, and adaptive coding with precoding. We show that the three considered strategies approach the optimal distortion-cost trade-off, but the best performance is obtained with the adaptive coding scheme when precoding is utilized. Copyright © 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ∗Correspondence E-mail: [email protected]. Facultad de Informática, Campus Elviña s/n, 15071, A Coruña.