Joint source-channel optimization over wireless relay networks

Cooperative communications have received considerable attention for wireless multimedia applications as a technique to improve reliability and service coverage. To apply such cooperation over slow fading channels, we consider exploiting the spatial diversity in multiple relay networks. In this paper, we focus on amplify-and-forward relaying schemes, namely, orthogonal amplify-and-forward, selective relaying, and distributed beamforming, for the cooperative wireless multimedia transmission. Furthermore, the successive refinement source coding is exploited such that the multimedia signal is encoded into multiple layers and the quality of its reconstruction at the receiver is improved when more layers are received correctly. We study two strategies for the layered source transmission, namely, progressive transmission and superposition coding. With our developed framework, we propose suboptimal resource allocation algorithms to efficiently assign rate, power, and channel uses to different layers so as to maximize the quality of the multimedia signal reconstructed at the receiver. The proposed optimization methodology is simple and only requires the knowledge of the channel statistics compared to the existing algorithms. As a result, the receiver only requires to feedback the determined rate, power, and channel uses to the transmitter whenever the channel statistics or the layered source transmission strategy changes.