Wyner-Ziv Coding over Broadcast Channels: Digital Schemes

This paper addresses lossy transmission of a common source over a broadcast channel when there is correlated side information at the receivers, with emphasis on the quadratic Gaussian and binary Hamming cases. A digital scheme that combines ideas from the lossless version of the problem, i.e., Slepian-Wolf coding over broadcast channels, and dirty paper coding, is presented and analyzed. This scheme uses layered coding where the common layer information is intended for both receivers and the refinement information is destined only for one receiver. For the quadratic Gaussian case, a quantity characterizing the overall quality of each receiver is identified in terms of channel and side information parameters. It is shown that it is more advantageous to send the refinement information to the receiver with "better" overall quality. In the case where all receivers have the same overall quality, the presented scheme becomes optimal. Unlike its lossless counterpart, however, the problem eludes a complete characterization

The Multi-way Relay Channel

The multiuser communication channel, in which multiple users exchange information with the help of a relay terminal, termed the multi-way relay channel (mRC), is introduced. In this model, multiple interfering clusters of users communicate simultaneously, where the users within the same cluster wish to exchange messages among themselves. It is assumed that the users cannot receive each other's signals directly, and hence the relay terminal in this model is the enabler of communication. In particular, restricted encoders, which ignore the received channel output and use only the corresponding messages for generating the channel input, are considered. Achievable rate regions and an outer bound are characterized for the Gaussian mRC, and their comparison is presented in terms of exchange rates in a symmetric Gaussian network scenario. It is shown that the compress-and-forward (CF) protocol achieves exchange rates within a constant bit offset of the exchange capacity independent of the power constraints of the terminals in the network. A finite bit gap between the exchange rates achieved by the CF and the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols is also shown. The two special cases of the mRC, the full data exchange model, in which every user wants to receive messages of all other users, and the pairwise data exchange model which consists of multiple two-way relay channels, are investigated in detail. In particular for the pairwise data exchange model, in addition to the proposed random coding based achievable schemes, a nested lattice coding based scheme is also presented and is shown to achieve exchange rates within a constant bit gap of the exchange capacity.Comment: Revised version of our submission to the Transactions on Information Theor

Distributed Joint Source-Channel Coding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Considering the fact that sensors are energy-limited and the wireless channel conditions in wireless sensor networks, there is an urgent need for a low-complexity coding method with high compression ratio and noise-resisted features. This paper reviews the progress made in distributed joint source-channel coding which can address this issue. The main existing deployments, from the theory to practice, of distributed joint source-channel coding over the independent channels, the multiple access channels and the broadcast channels are introduced, respectively. To this end, we also present a practical scheme for compressing multiple correlated sources over the independent channels. The simulation results demonstrate the desired efficiency

Relaying Simultaneous Multicast Messages

The problem of multicasting multiple messages with the help of a relay, which may also have an independent message of its own to multicast, is considered. As a first step to address this general model, referred to as the compound multiple access channel with a relay (cMACr), the capacity region of the multiple access channel with a "cognitive" relay is characterized, including the cases of partial and rate-limited cognition. Achievable rate regions for the cMACr model are then presented based on decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF) relaying strategies. Moreover, an outer bound is derived for the special case in which each transmitter has a direct link to one of the receivers while the connection to the other receiver is enabled only through the relay terminal. Numerical results for the Gaussian channel are also provided.Comment: This paper was presented at the IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Volos, Greece, June 200

Source Coding Problems with Conditionally Less Noisy Side Information

A computable expression for the rate-distortion (RD) function proposed by Heegard and Berger has eluded information theory for nearly three decades. Heegard and Berger's single-letter achievability bound is well known to be optimal for \emph{physically degraded} side information; however, it is not known whether the bound is optimal for arbitrarily correlated side information (general discrete memoryless sources). In this paper, we consider a new setup in which the side information at one receiver is \emph{conditionally less noisy} than the side information at the other. The new setup includes degraded side information as a special case, and it is motivated by the literature on degraded and less noisy broadcast channels. Our key contribution is a converse proving the optimality of Heegard and Berger's achievability bound in a new setting. The converse rests upon a certain \emph{single-letterization} lemma, which we prove using an information theoretic telescoping identity {recently presented by Kramer}. We also generalise the above ideas to two different successive-refinement problems

Hybrid Digital/Analog Schemes for Secure Transmission with Side Information

Recent results on source-channel coding for secure transmission show that separation holds in several cases under some less-noisy conditions. However, it has also been proved through a simple counterexample that pure analog schemes can be optimal and hence outperform digital ones. According to these observations and assuming matched-bandwidth, we present a novel hybrid digital/analog scheme that aims to gather the advantages of both digital and analog ones. In the quadratic Gaussian setup when side information is only present at the eavesdropper, this strategy is proved to be optimal. Furthermore, it outperforms both digital and analog schemes and cannot be achieved via time-sharing. An application example to binary symmetric sources with side information is also investigated.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. To be presented at ITW 201