Optimal Rate and Power Allocation for Layered Transmission with Superposition Coding

The problem of transmitting an analog source over a quasi-static fading channel is considered. This problem is motivated by the recent demand for multimedia content over wireless channels. The goal is to minimize the expected distortion of the received signal. An efficient numerical technique is proposed to explicitly solve the rate and power allocation problems at a finite SNR. The proposed algorithm iteratively optimizes the rates for a given power allocation and vice versa, and is guaranteed to converge