Transmission of Compressed Multimedia Data over Wireless Channels using Space-time OFDM with Adaptive Beamforming

The transmission of multimedia data over wireless channels poses significant constraints on the communication system bandwidth, energy, and latency. To overcome these bottlenecks to wireless multimedia communication, various channel coding and transmit diversity schemes have been proposed. In previous work, we have shown that space-time block-coding (STBC) with adaptive beamforming (STBC-OFDM-AB) is an effective technique for improving the error-rate performance and channel capacity of wireless multimedia systems utilizing OFDM. In this paper, we introduce a transmission system for multimedia communication employing STBC-OFDM with adaptive beamforming incorporating a perceptually-based image compression coder - which consists of a 2-D discrete wavelet transform (DWT), an adaptive quantizer (with thresholding) and variable-length entropy encoding. Initial simulation results based on the transmission of compressed images, showed that the performance improvement introduced by STBC-OFDM-AB can be readily observed, and compared to other transmission methods is better suited to wireless multimedia communication.