Multiple Description Quantization via Gram-Schmidt Orthogonalization

The multiple description (MD) problem has received considerable attention as a model of information transmission over unreliable channels. A general framework for designing efficient multiple description quantization schemes is proposed in this paper. We provide a systematic treatment of the El Gamal-Cover (EGC) achievable MD rate-distortion region, and show that any point in the EGC region can be achieved via a successive quantization scheme along with quantization splitting. For the quadratic Gaussian case, the proposed scheme has an intrinsic connection with the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization, which implies that the whole Gaussian MD rate-distortion region is achievable with a sequential dithered lattice-based quantization scheme as the dimension of the (optimal) lattice quantizers becomes large. Moreover, this scheme is shown to be universal for all i.i.d. smooth sources with performance no worse than that for an i.i.d. Gaussian source with the same variance and asymptotically optimal at high resolution. A class of low-complexity MD scalar quantizers in the proposed general framework also is constructed and is illustrated geometrically; the performance is analyzed in the high resolution regime, which exhibits a noticeable improvement over the existing MD scalar quantization schemes.Comment: 48 pages; submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Optimal Quantization for Compressive Sensing under Message Passing Reconstruction

We consider the optimal quantization of compressive sensing measurements following the work on generalization of relaxed belief propagation (BP) for arbitrary measurement channels. Relaxed BP is an iterative reconstruction scheme inspired by message passing algorithms on bipartite graphs. Its asymptotic error performance can be accurately predicted and tracked through the state evolution formalism. We utilize these results to design mean-square optimal scalar quantizers for relaxed BP signal reconstruction and empirically demonstrate the superior error performance of the resulting quantizers.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 2011; minor corrections in v

Asymptotic Task-Based Quantization with Application to Massive MIMO

Quantizers take part in nearly every digital signal processing system which operates on physical signals. They are commonly designed to accurately represent the underlying signal, regardless of the specific task to be performed on the quantized data. In systems working with high-dimensional signals, such as massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, it is beneficial to utilize low-resolution quantizers, due to cost, power, and memory constraints. In this work we study quantization of high-dimensional inputs, aiming at improving performance under resolution constraints by accounting for the system task in the quantizers design. We focus on the task of recovering a desired signal statistically related to the high-dimensional input, and analyze two quantization approaches: We first consider vector quantization, which is typically computationally infeasible, and characterize the optimal performance achievable with this approach. Next, we focus on practical systems which utilize hardware-limited scalar uniform analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and design a task-based quantizer under this model. The resulting system accounts for the task by linearly combining the observed signal into a lower dimension prior to quantization. We then apply our proposed technique to channel estimation in massive MIMO networks. Our results demonstrate that a system utilizing low-resolution scalar ADCs can approach the optimal channel estimation performance by properly accounting for the task in the system design

On Distributed Linear Estimation With Observation Model Uncertainties

We consider distributed estimation of a Gaussian source in a heterogenous bandwidth constrained sensor network, where the source is corrupted by independent multiplicative and additive observation noises, with incomplete statistical knowledge of the multiplicative noise. For multi-bit quantizers, we derive the closed-form mean-square-error (MSE) expression for the linear minimum MSE (LMMSE) estimator at the FC. For both error-free and erroneous communication channels, we propose several rate allocation methods named as longest root to leaf path, greedy and integer relaxation to (i) minimize the MSE given a network bandwidth constraint, and (ii) minimize the required network bandwidth given a target MSE. We also derive the Bayesian Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and compare the MSE performance of our proposed methods against the CRLB. Our results corroborate that, for low power multiplicative observation noises and adequate network bandwidth, the gaps between the MSE of our proposed methods and the CRLB are negligible, while the performance of other methods like individual rate allocation and uniform is not satisfactory