Analysis on a multilevel unequal-error-protected STBC

Recently, broadcast services are introduced in cellular networks and transmission of progressive image and scalable video is an effective way to enhance the spectral efficiency and coverage of the system. One kind of unequal-error-protected (UEP) transmission is a promising way to enlarge the broadcasting coverage, where the cell-center users receive all the broadcasting information and the cell-edge users receive part of the broadcasting information with higher quality. The UEP-space time block codes (UEP-STBCs) is proposed in this paper, in which different symbols can be transmitted with different performance by utilizing multiple antennas. The codes can be constructed with either orthogonal STBC or quasi-orthogonal STBC, and the performance analysis and simulation results are then presented in this paper. Meanwhile, based on the proposed UEP-STBC, a cooperative transmission scheme with amplify and forward relay is presented in this paper, which can greatly improve the service quality of the cell-edge user.