Hybrid Digital-analog Transmission Research Articles

Subsampling of 3D Pixel Blocks as a Video Compression Method for Analog Transmission

Hybrid digital–analog transmission of video signals enables flexibility in dividing video information into two parts to utilize the available bandwidth better. This study proposes a compression scheme to reduce the utilized bandwidth. The scheme uses different subsampling in three-dimensional (3D) blocks, where subsampling factors are selected to minimize reconstruction distortion. The study evaluates various methods for subsampling and reconstruction to find the best combination in terms of reconstruction quality and complexity. Results show that medium-quality reconstructions can be obtained for compression ratios of about 0.125–0.3 samples per pixel.

Synthesis-Distortion-Aware Hybrid Digital Analog Transmission for 3D Videos

The hybrid digital-analog (HDA) video transmission scheme can be used to avoid the cliff effect and saturation effect. However, directly using HDA in 3D video transmission requires too much bandwidth. This paper addresses synthesis-distortion-aware HDA transmission for 3D videos to improve transmission performance. First, a 3D HDA framework that transmits both texture and depth videos in HDA mode is designed. Second, a recursive synthesis distortion estimation model, called RSDE-3D-HDA, is derived, where the transmission errors of both the texture and depth sequences are considered. Third, we optimize the power allocation between digital and analog signals based on the RSDE-3D-HDA. Finally, simulation results show that our model is accurate and the proposed 3D-HDA achieves better performance in terms of synthesis quality than state-of-the-art methods.

Power Efficient Scheduling and Hybrid Precoding for Time Modulated Arrays

We consider power efficient scheduling and precoding solutions for multiantenna hybrid digital-analog transmission systems that use Time-Modulated Arrays (TMAs) in the analog domain. TMAs perform beamforming with switches instead of conventional Phase Shifters (PSs). The extremely low insertion losses of switches, together with their reduced power consumption and cost make TMAs attractive in emerging technologies like massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and millimeter wave (mmWave) systems. We propose a novel analog processing network based on TMAs and provide an angular scheduling algorithm that overcomes the limitations of conventional approaches. Next, we pose a convex optimization problem to determine the analog precoder. This formulation allows us to account for the Sideband Radiation (SR) effect inherent to TMAs, and achieve remarkable power efficiencies with a very low impact on performance. Computer experiments results show that the proposed design, while presenting a significantly better power efficiency, achieves a throughput similar to that obtained with other strategies based on angular selection for conventional architectures.

Joint Rate and Resource Allocation in Hybrid Digital–Analog Transmission Over Fading Channels

In hybrid digital-analog (HDA) systems, resource allocation has been utilized to achieve desired distortion performance. However, existing studies on this issue assume error-free digital transmission, which is not valid for fading channels. With time-varying channel fading, the exact channel state information is not available at the transmitter. Thus, random outage and resulting digital distortion cannot be ignored. Moreover, rate allocation should be considered in resource allocation, since it not only determines the amount of information for digital transmission and that for analog transmission, but also affects the outage probability. Based on above observations, in this paper, we attempt to perform joint rate and resource allocation strategies to optimize system distortion in HDA systems over fading channels. Consider a bandwidth expansion scenario where a memoryless Gaussian source is transmitted in an HDA system with the entropy-constrained scalar quantizer (ECSQ). Firstly, we formulate the joint allocation problem as an expected system distortion minimization problem where both analog and digital distortion are considered. Then, in the limit of low outage probability, we decompose the problem into two coupled sub-problems based on the block coordinate descent method, and propose an iterative gradient algorithm to approach the optimal solution. Furthermore, we extend our work to the multivariate Gaussian source scenario where a two-stage fast algorithm integrating rounding and greedy strategies is proposed to optimize the joint rate and resource allocation problem. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can achieve up to 2.3dB gains in terms of signal-to-distortion ratio over existing schemes under the single Gaussian source scenario, and up to 3.5dB gains under the multivariate Gaussian source scenario.

Distortion Exponent in MIMO Fading Channels With Time-Varying Source Side Information

Transmission of a Gaussian source over a time-varying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel is studied under strict delay constraints. Availability of a correlated side information at the receiver is assumed, whose quality, i.e., its correlation with the source signal, also varies over time. A block-fading model is considered for the states of the time-varying channel and side information; perfect state information at the receiver is assumed, while the transmitter knows only the statistics. The high signal to noise ratio performance, characterized by the distortion exponent, is studied for this joint source-channel coding problem. An upper bound is derived and compared with several lower bounds based on list decoding (LD), hybrid digital–analog transmission, as well as multi-layer schemes, which transmit successive refinements of the source, relying on progressive or superposition transmission with LD. The optimal distortion exponent is characterized for the single-input multiple-output and multiple-input single-output scenarios by showing that the distortion exponent achieved by multi-layer superposition encoding with joint decoding meets the proposed upper bound. In the MIMO scenario, the optimal distortion exponent is characterized in the low bandwidth ratio regime, and it is shown that the multi-layer superposition encoding performs very close to the upper bound in the high bandwidth ratio regime.

Joint Power Allocation in Wireless Relay Networks: the Case of Hybrid Digital-Analog Transmission

In conventional digital communication systems, the quality of the received signal does not improve beyond a certain level as the channel quality increases. Such kind of quality saturation effect is caused by the unrecoverable quantization errors produced by source coding. The Hybrid Digital-Analog (HDA) transmission, where the quantization errors are transmitted in an analog mode along with the quantized data in a digital mode, has been recognized as an effective technique to combat the quality saturation effect. In this paper, we introduce HDA transmission in Wireless Relay Networks (WRNs) over Rayleigh slow-fading channels to eliminate the quality saturation effect and achieve graceful improvement for the better channel quality. Our goal is to minimize the end-to-end distortion by optimal power allocation. We note that digital-analog power allocation involved in HDA transmission is coupled with source-relay power allocation in WRNs. Therefore, the joint power allocation problem should be considered. We investigate this problem for two kinds of relays in WRNs, i.e., Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relays and Decode-and-Forward (DF) relays. In the case of AF relays, we find that the joint power problem is concave and thus derive the explicit expressions of the optimal solution. In the case of DF relays, we formulate the joint power allocation problem as a nonlinear fractional programming problem and then propose an efficient algorithm to search the optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed joint power allocation schemes outperform existing schemes in terms of end-to-end distortion in both WRNs with AF relays and that with DF relays under various channel conditions.

Joint Source-Channel Coding With Time-Varying Channel and Side-Information

Transmission of a Gaussian source over a time-varying Gaussian channel is studied in the presence of time-varying correlated side information at the receiver. A block fading model is considered for both the channel and the side information, whose states are assumed to be known only at the receiver. The optimality of separate source and channel coding in terms of average end-to-end distortion is shown when the channel is static, while the side information state follows a discrete or a continuous and quasiconcave distribution. When both the channel and side information states are time-varying, separate source and channel coding is suboptimal in general. A partially informed encoder lower bound is studied by providing the channel state information to the encoder. Several achievable transmission schemes are proposed based on uncoded transmission, separate source and channel coding, joint decoding, and hybrid digital–analog transmission. Uncoded transmission is shown to be optimal for a class of continuous and quasiconcave side information state distributions, while the channel gain may have an arbitrary distribution. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example, in which the uncoded transmission achieves the optimal performance thanks to the time-varying nature of the states, while it is suboptimal in the static version of the same problem. Then, the optimal distortion exponent, which quantifies the exponential decay rate of the expected distortion in the high SNR regime, is characterized for Nakagami distributed channel and side information states, and it is shown to be achieved by hybrid digital–analog and joint decoding schemes in certain cases, illustrating the suboptimality of pure digital or analog transmission in general.

Hybrid Digital–Analog transmission for wireless acoustic sensor networks

A crucial task of a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network (WASN) is the transmission of the acoustic signal to a central fusion node. Due to different microphone locations, the microphones may experience different or even varying radio channel qualities. Usually, the design of the digital transmission scheme is governed by the worst-case radio channel. For given radio resources, the end-to-end audio quality is specified by the compromise between the fidelity of the audio encoder and the required error protection capabilities of the channel encoder. The quantization noise of the audio encoder limits the end-to-end SNR even for increasing radio channel qualities. In the fusion node, the decoded signals are combined (fusion algorithm) and the overall output audio quality is limited due to the quantization noise even for error free transmission. In this paper it is shown that this unfavorable behavior can be avoided by using a Hybrid Digital-Analog (HDA) transmission concept. The key feature of HDA is that the audio output quality improves with increasing channel qualities. For typical fusion algorithms the HDA system supersedes purely digital transmission for all radio channel qualities.

Zero-Delay Joint Source-Channel Coding Using Hybrid Digital-Analog Schemes in the Wyner-Ziv Setting

This paper studies zero-delay joint source-channel coding (JSCC) of Gaussian sources over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels in the Wyner-Ziv scenario, that is, when there is side information about the source available only to the receiver. The proposed encoding scheme is based on hybrid digital-analog (HDA) transmission in a zero-delay fashion. Specifically, to achieve zero-delay, after applying scalar quantization to the source, the properly scaled analog information (quantization error) is superimposed on the scaled digital information (quantized source), and then transmitted. At the receiver side, several reconstruction schemes are analyzed. It is shown that all the schemes, when optimized, are superior to existing uncoded, digital, or hybrid transmission methods. It is also shown that the proposed HDA transmission may result in increased robustness to channel and/or side information mismatch compared to uncoded transmission. Observing that the bandwidth-matched Wyner-Ziv problem is intimately related to the coding scenario without side information but with bandwidth expansion factor 2, the proposed scheme is applied to the latter problem. It is shown that this application results in a better performance than the well-known inverse spiral mapping.

Comparison of Practical Feedback Algorithms for Multiuser MIMO

We consider the problem of obtaining channel state information (CSI) via a fast feedback link for transmission on the downlink of a multiuser MIMO system. We examine the relative merits of channel feedback schemes based on Shannon's source-channel separation principle (digital schemes) and non-separation based schemes and show that the latter are preferable in this application when small to moderate bandwidth expansion ratios are used as in many current cellular systems. For comparison, we first compute upper-bounds on the performance of the system as a function of SNR. For the non-separation based schemes, we first consider a simple analog transmission and then develop a hybrid digital-analog transmission scheme which quantizes the CSI using a few bits and sends these bits and also the quantization error using analog transmission. We show that the hybrid scheme achieves a higher throughput compared to both analog and digital transmissions and has a much lower computational complexity compared to a digital scheme.

Hybrid Digital-Analog Relaying for Cooperative Transmission Over Slow Fading Channels

Hybrid digital-analog coding schemes have been proposed in source-channel coding to increase the robustness toward channel mismatch, in the absence of transmitter channel state information (CSIT). Recognizing that the same kind of robustness is needed at the relay in a three-node relay network, we propose several novel relaying protocols based on hybrid digital-analog transmission. We compare the performance of the new schemes with traditional digital-only (decode-and-forward or compress-and-forward) or analog-only (amplify-and-forward) relaying, as well as to performance bounds corresponding to genie-aided compress-and-forward relaying. Our new protocols achieve significant gains in terms of achievable expected rates, and they are able to close in on the performance bounds. In particular, we conclude that the best overall performance is obtained by an adaptive combination of decode-and-forward and hybrid digital-analog relaying.