Rate optimization to minimize distortion for source-channel coded H-BLAST with SIC decoding

As joint source and channel coding schemes, layered transmission schemes for a successive refinable source (SRS) are recently studied over quasi-static fading channels. In this letter, we consider spatial layered transmission for a SRS with successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoder over quasistatic multi-input multi-output (MIMO) fading channels. We show that if the distortion function can be factorized, the minimum average distortion can be obtained by individual rate optimization for each layer when zero-forcing (ZF) SIC receiver is employed over Rayleigh fading channels.