Multiple Description Quantizer Design for Space-time Orthogonal Block Coded Channels

We study the design of multiple description quantizers for space-time orthogonal block coded slow Rayleigh fading channels. A time-interleaver is employed at the transmitter to provide independent channel instances for the multiple descriptions, and a maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder is employed at the receiver to jointly decode the multiple descriptions. We propose a scheme to optimize multiple description vector quantizers using an upper bound of the channel transition probability achieved by the MAP decoder. The scheme furnishes substantial performance gain.