Rotated Constellations for Video Transmission Over Rayleigh Fading Channels

A joint source-channel coding scheme for transmission of video over flat Rayleigh fading channels is described. The coding scheme consists of a spatiotemporal motion-compensated wavelet decomposition, a vector quantization of the coefficients through maximum-diversity lattices, and a linear labeling which minimizes simultaneously the source and channel distortion. Modulation diversity via rotated constellations produces the maximum-diversity lattices which increase robustness to channel fading without the addition of redundancy. Experimental results compare the proposed system to a prominent scalable video coder protected by more traditional convolutional codes, and superior performance is observed for high levels of channel noise.