Analog joint source-channel coding in Rayleigh fading channels

We consider discrete-time all-analog-processing joint source-channel coding, using non-linear spiral-like curves. We assume a Rayleigh channel, where the receiver may employ or not multiple antennas. Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detection are considered. Our results show that MMSE performs much better than ML in high CSNR in single-antenna wireless systems, while diversity combining is able to significantly reduce such performance gap, therefore making the low complexity ML decoding very attractive in the case of multiple receive antennas.