Lossy transmission of correlated sources in a multiple access quasi-static fading channel

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate low-complexity, receiver-driven strategies for the transmission of two correlated sources in a multiple access quasi-static fading channel. We consider two different transmission modes at the physical (PHY) layer depending on the average signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the involved Rayleigh fading channels. The two modes that are allowed are orthogonal transmissions and interfering transmissions with successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. Further, we consider the sources are compressed independently while they are jointly decoded with an adaptive linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) algorithm. Hence, the receiver selects the combination of a PHY transmission mode that should be used at the sources, together with the adaptive MMSE-based estimation of each source. We show that in different SNR regimes, a different transmission strategy is optimum, that is in the low SNR regime interfering transmission together with MMSE decoding is better, while in the high SNR regime orthogonal transmission is superior. Both schemes outperform distributed source coding (DSC) based approaches regardless of the degree of the correlation of the two sources. © 2016 IEEE.