The Achievable Distortion Region of Sending a Bivariate Gaussian Source on the Gaussian Broadcast Channel

Abstract

We provide a complete characterization of the achievable distortion region for the problem of sending a bivariate Gaussian source over bandwidth-matched Gaussian broadcast channels, where each receiver is interested in only one component of the source. This setting naturally generalizes the simple single Gaussian source bandwidth-matched broadcast problem for which the uncoded scheme is known to be optimal. We show that a hybrid scheme can achieve the optimum for the bivariate case, but neither an uncoded scheme alone nor a separation-based scheme alone is sufficient. We further show that in this joint source channel coding setting, the Gaussian scenario is the worst scenario among the sources and channel noises with the same covariances.