Joint Source-Channel Coding for the MIMO Broadcast Channel

We investigate the problem of broadcasting analog sources to several users using short codes, employing several antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver, and channel-optimized quantization. Our main objective is to minimize the sum mean-square error distortion. A joint multi-user encoder, as well as a structured encoder with separate encoders for the different users, are proposed. The first encoder outperforms the latter, which, in turn, offers large improvements compared to state-of-the-art, over a wide range of channel signal-to-noise ratios. Our proposed methods handle bandwidth expansion, i.e., usage of more channel than source dimensions, automatically. We also derive a lower bound on the distortion.