Lossy transmission over slow-fading AWGN channels: a comparison of progressive and superposition and hybrid approaches

We consider some known techniques for transmitting an analog source under the quadratic distortion criterion over a slowly-varying fading AWGN channel. We examine the case where the source is actually compressed, i.e., the source bandwidth is larger than the channel bandwidth. This makes the problem non-trivial. We optimize progressive transmission, superposition coding and an analog-digital hybrid approach in order to achieve minimal average distortion. Then, we compare the resulting optimized systems in terms of average and instantaneous reconstructed signal to noise ratio