Joint Source-Channel Codes for MIMO Block Fading Channels

We consider transmission of a continuous amplitude source over an L-block Rayleigh fading $M_t \times M_r$ MIMO channel when the channel state information is only available at the receiver. Since the channel is not ergodic, Shannon's source-channel separation theorem becomes obsolete and the optimal performance requires a joint source -channel approach. Our goal is to minimize the expected end-to-end distortion, particularly in the high SNR regime. The figure of merit is the distortion exponent, defined as the exponential decay rate of the expected distortion with increasing SNR. We provide an upper bound and lower bounds for the distortion exponent with respect to the bandwidth ratio among the channel and source bandwidths. For the lower bounds, we analyze three different strategies based on layered source coding concatenated with progressive, superposition or hybrid digital/analog transmission. In each case, by adjusting the system parameters we optimize the distortion exponent as a function of the bandwidth ratio. We prove that the distortion exponent upper bound can be achieved when the channel has only one degree of freedom, that is L=1, and $\min\{M_t,M_r\}=1$. When we have more degrees of freedom, our achievable distortion exponents meet the upper bound for only certain ranges of the bandwidth ratio. We demonstrate that our results, which were derived for a complex Gaussian source, can be extended to more general source distributions as well.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figure

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Distortion Exponent in MIMO Fading Channels with Time-Varying Source Side Information

Transmission of a Gaussian source over a time-varying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel is studied under strict delay constraints. Availability of a correlated side information at the receiver is assumed, whose quality, i.e., correlation with the source signal, also varies over time. A block-fading model is considered for the states of the time-varying channel and the time-varying side information; and perfect state information at the receiver is assumed, while the transmitter knows only the statistics. The high SNR performance, characterized by the \textit{distortion exponent}, is studied for this joint source-channel coding problem. An upper bound is derived and compared with lowers based on list decoding, hybrid digital-analog transmission, as well as multi-layer schemes which transmit successive refinements of the source, relying on progressive and superposed transmission with list decoding. The optimal distortion exponent is characterized for the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input single-output (MISO) scenarios by showing that the distortion exponent achieved by multi-layer superpositon encoding with joint decoding meets the proposed upper bound. In the MIMO scenario, the optimal distortion exponent is characterized in the low bandwidth ratio regime, and it is shown that the multi-layer superposition encoding performs very close to the upper bound in the high bandwidth expansion regime.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Distortion Exponent in MIMO Channels with Feedback

The transmission of a Gaussian source over a block-fading multiple antenna channel in the presence of a feedback link is considered. The feedback link is assumed to be an error and delay free link of capacity 1 bit per channel use. Under the short-term power constraint, the optimal exponential behavior of the end-to-end average distortion is characterized for all source-channel bandwidth ratios. It is shown that the optimal transmission strategy is successive refinement source coding followed by progressive transmission over the channel, in which the channel block is allocated dynamically among the layers based on the channel state using the feedback link as an instantaneous automatic repeat request (ARQ) signal.Comment: Presented at the IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), Taormina, Italy, Oct. 200