On the distortion exponent of block-fading Gaussian interference channels

This paper studies the achievable distortion exponent of a white Gaussian source transmitted over a block fading Gaussian interference channel. Here-as opposed to most of the literature-SNR´s and INR´s are not restricted to be symmetric among the transmitter-receiver pairs. At the source encoder, both Multiple Description Coding (MDC) and Successive Refinement (SR) encoding are considered. At the channel encoders, different rate splitting options in the Han and Kobayashi achievable scheme are considered. The achievable distortion exponent is found to be the solution of a linear program for all the cases considered. We show that a particular rate splitting scheme inspired by the recent “to within one bit” capacity result for the unfaded case performs better than schemes without rate splitting in weak interference. We also show that the MDC scheme always outperforms the SR scheme.