Optimal Layered Transmission Over Quasi-Static Fading Channels

We consider layered transmission of a successively refinable complex Gaussian source over a quasi-static fading channel. For a given number of source coding layers, we propose an efficient algorithm to calculate the optimal rate assignment for each layer, as well as the optimal size of each layer. The optimality of the algorithm is proved and numerical results for a multiple antenna Rayleigh fading channel are presented. It is numerically shown that a small number of layers is usually sufficient to achieve most of the layering gain