Spatial Diversity Using Analog Joint Source Channel Coding in Wireless Channels

We consider the use of spatial diversity to improve the performance of analog joint source-channel coding in wireless fading channels. The communication system analyzed in this paper consists of discrete-time all-analog-processing joint source-channel coding where Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detection are employed. By assuming a fast-fading Rayleigh channel, we show that MMSE performs much better than ML at high Channel Signal-to-Noise Ratios (CSNR) in single-antenna wireless systems. However, such performance gap can be significantly reduced by using multiple receive antennas, thus making low complexity ML decoding very attractive in the case of receive diversity. Moreover, we show that the analog scheme can be considerably robust to imperfect channel estimation. In addition, as an alternative to multiple antennas, we also consider spatial diversity through cooperative communications, and show that the application of the Amplify-and-Forward (AF) protocol with single antenna nodes leads to similar results than when two antennas are available at the receiver and Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) is applied. Finally, we show that the MMSE implementation of the analog scheme performs very close to the unconstrained capacity of digital schemes using scalar quantization, while its complexity is much lower than that of capacity-approaching digital systems.