Joint source and Turbo Trellis Coded Hierarchical Modulation for context-aware medical image transmission

An iterative Joint Source and Turbo Trellis Coded Hierarchical Modulation is introduced for robust context-aware medical image transmission. Lossless source compression as well as Quality of Service (QoS) might be considered as the main constraints in the telemedicine field. Our proposed scheme advocated was design to exploit both the joint source-and-channel iterative decoding and the cooperative structure in order for tackling these requirements. The Source Node (SN) is constituted by a lossless Variable Length Code (VLC) and Turbo Trellis-Coded Modulation (TTCM) which relies on Hierarchical Modulation (HM). The Relay Node (RN) is used to support the transmission of the most important content of the image. Our proposed scheme exhibits a robustness performance over a realistic uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel, while it outperforms the non-cooperative scheme by 3 dB at asymptotic (error-free) Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) value.