Scalable image transmission over differentially space-time coded OFDM systems

This paper combines joint source-channel coding, differential space-time coding and OFDM for scalable image transmission over differentially space-time coded OFDM (DSTC-OFDM) systems. The SNR versus BER performance of these systems are measured by simulation. We consider transmitting embedded source bitstreams over such systems using product channel codes that are designed to combat both bit errors and fading. For a given average SNR (hence BER), a fast joint source-channel coding algorithm is used to optimize the product code rates. Experiments show that the diversity gain in our DSTC-OFDM system can be translated into quality gains (in PSNR) in transmitted images.