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Title

On the Interdependence of Routing and Data Compression in Multi-Hop Sensor Networks.

Authors

A. Scaglione, S. D. Servetto.

Status

In the Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), Atlanta, GA, September 2002.

Abstract

We consider a problem of broadcast communication in a multi-hop network, in which samples of a random field are collected at each node of the network, and the goal is for every node to obtain an estimate of the entire field within a prescribed distortion value. The main idea we explore in this paper is that of jointly compressing the data generated by different nodes as this information travels over multiple hops, to eliminate correlations in the representation of the sampled field. Our main contributions are (a) that we obtain, using simple network flow concepts, conditions on the rate/distortion function of the random field, so as to guarantee that any node can obtain the measurements collected at every other node in the network, quantized to within any prescribed distortion value; and (b) we construct a large class of physically-motivated stochastic models for sensor data, for which we are able to prove that the joint rate/distortion function of all the data generated by the whole network grows slower than the bounds found in (a). A truly novel aspect of our work is the tight coupling between routing and source coding, explicitly formulated in a simple and analytically tractable model---to the best of our knowledge, this connection had not been studied before.

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