Abstract— We consider the lossy transmission of source information over Rayleigh fading channels. We investigate the utility of two channel capacity definitions, ergodic capacity, where it is assumed that the channel cycles through all fading states, and outage capacity, where the source is transmitted at a constant rate with a specified outage probability. We also study the outage rate and expected source distortion for different outage probabilities. It is observed that the outage probabilities required to maximize outage rate and minimize expected distortion are quite different. This implies that schemes based on maximizing capacity might not lead to the most efficient design for lossy transmission of source information over wireless networks. We show that minimizing expected distortion over a wireless link does not necessarily minimize the variance of the distortion, and hence parameter selection based on minimizing expected distortion can lead to a high distortion for a speci...
Sayantan Choudhury, Jerry D. Gibson