Distributed source coding for sensor networks

Distributed source coding is one of the enabling technologies for sensor networks. To date, work on DSC has focused mainly on lossless (Slepian-Wolf) and lossy (Wyner-Ziv) source coding with side information only at the decoder. Following the Wyner-Ziv coding approach, the existence of measurement noise, if not taken into accout, causes some mismatch between the actual correlation between the sources and the noiseless correlation statistics used to do the decoding. One way to resolve this issue is to use a robust code design. However if the noise statistics are known, they can be incorporated into the correlation model and thus considered in the code design for DSC. As for the cross-layer design aspect, DSC can be designed to work together with the transport layer to make transmissions smarter.