Reducing end-to-end distortion in noisy wireless relay networks

This paper investigates the provisioning of multi-media services from a novel perspective of reducing end-to-end distortion (EED) in a decode-and-forward relay network. Exploiting a logical mapping between scalable source information and superposition coding (SPC), a benchmark for EED evaluation is formulated and applied to demonstrate achievable gains of the SVC-SPC architecture in a fundamental three-node relay network. Performance impact under various fading channel conditions is investigated via numerical experiments when successive interference cancellation (SIC) is employed for SPC signal decoding.