Layered sources transmission with multiple antennas

This paper studies the optimal transmission of layered multimedia sources, which require unequal target error rates in their bitstream, over open-loop multiple antenna systems. First, we analyze the behavior of the crossover point of the outage probability curves for vertical Bell Labs space-time architecture with a minimum mean-square error receiver and orthogonal space-time block codes. It is proven that, as we increase the number of transmit antennas, which is set to be equal to that of receive antennas, the crossover point for the outage probability monotonically decreases. Next, we show that those results can be exploited to simplify the computational complexity involved with the optimal space-time coding of a layered bitstream.