Performance evaluation of variable transmission rate OFDM systems via network source coding

Studies related to the network source coding have addressed rate-distortion analysis in both noiseless and noisy channels. However, to the best of authors’ knowledge, no prior work has studied network source coding in the context of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In addition, the system performance using network source coding schemes also remains unknown. In this article, we first propose two variable transmission rate (VTR) OFDM systems by utilizing network source coding schemes, and then evaluate the system performance of these two proposed VTR-OFDM systems. For the proposed VTR single-input single-output OFDM system, we employ the concept of a network with intermediate nodes to develop a 3-stage encoder/decoder, and the proposed encoder provides three different coding rates from 0.5 to 0.8. As for the proposed VTR multi-band OFDM system, two correlated sources are simultaneously transmitted using the multiterminal source coding schemes, and two sources are encoded by different coding rates from 0.25 to 0.5. Finally, compared with the traditional uncoded OFDM system, the proposed VTR-OFDM systems have at least 1 to 4 dB gain in signal-to-noise ratio to achieve the same symbol error rate in the additive white Gaussian noise channel.