Diversity techniques are often employed to average over independent fluctuations in a communications medium, thereby reducing variations in performance and often dramatically improving average performance. For communication of multimedia signals, such as audio or video, there are two basic approaches to exploiting diversity in such scenarios: channel coding at the physical layer, or multiple description source coding at the application layer. We introduce a framework for analyzing and comparing these approaches, and develop a joint source-channel approach based upon multiple descriptions that leverages the benefits of both. The model and results apply to wireless channels with disjoint frequency bands and/or multiple antennas, and to wired networks such as the Internet with multiple paths between a source and destination.

Joint work with John Apostolopoulos at Hewlett-Packard Labs and Emin Martinian and Gregory Wornell at MIT.

J. Nicholas Laneman is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, in 2002. His research interests are in wireless communications and networking, information theory, and detection & estimation. He received the MIT EECS Harold L. Hazen Teaching Award in 2001 and the ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award in 2003. He is a member of IEEE, ASEE, and Sigma Xi.