Layered source-channel coding: A distortion-diversity perspective

Source-channel coding in time-varying channels without perfect side information at the transmitter suffers from uncertainty which may not always be averaged out. In channel coding, a main approach to address such uncertainty has been the outage formulation. In source coding, the main approaches to deal with such uncertainty have been multiple description coding (MDC) and successive refinement (SR). In this paper, we consider layered source-channel coding schemes relying on the MDC technique, originally proposed by Laneman et al, and the SR technique. We introduce the concept of distortion-diversity tradeoff, akin to the rate-diversity tradeoff, to consider the performance of these schemes. Our distortion-diversity perspective sheds some light on the performance comparison between various source-channel coding approaches in different operation regions.