Joint data compression and error protection over wireless fading channels using LDPC codes

This paper presents an efficient and robust method for joint source and channel coding over wireless fading channels. In a hierarchical wireless network, we consider cases in which a mobile transmission may be simultaneously received by multiple regional processing centers, which then collaborate by sending distorted data to a common higher-level processing center. We propose a generic framework for the joint compression and error protection of these correlated bit-streams received by distributed receivers over wireless fading channels. We show that joint decoders can achieve significant improvement.