Progressive image transmission over space-time coded OFDM-based MIMO systems with adaptive modulation

This paper considers a progressive image transmission system over wireless channels by combining joint source-channel coding (JSCC), space-time coding, and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The BER performance of the space-time coded OFDM-based MIMO system based on a newly built broadband MIMO fading model is first evaluated by assuming perfect channel state information at the receiver for coherent detection. Then, for a given average SNR ( hence, BER), a fast local search algorithm is applied to optimize the unequal error protection design in JSCC, subjected to fixed total transmitted energy for various constellation sizes. This design allows the measurement of the expected reconstructed image quality. With this end-to-end system performance evaluation, an adaptive modulation scheme is proposed to pick the constellation size that offers the best reconstructed image quality for each average SNR. Simulation results of practical image transmissions confirm the effectiveness of our proposed adaptive modulation scheme.