Distortion Outage Probability in MIMO Block-Fading Channels

Abstract: We study analogue source transmission over MIMO block-fading channels with receiver-only channel state information. Unlike previous work which considers the end-to-end expected distortion as a figure of merit, we study the distortion outage probability. We first consider the well known transmitter informed bound, which yields a benchmark lower bound to the distortion outage probability of any coding scheme. We next compare the results with source-channel separation. The key difference from the expected distortion approach is that if the channel code rate is chosen appropriately, source-channel separation can not only achieve the same diversity exponent, but also the same distortion outage probability as the transmitter informed lower bound.