On Practical Design for Joint Distributed Source and Network Coding

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information theory Vol. 55; no. 4; pp. 1709 - 1720
• Main Authors: Yunnan Wu, Stankovic, V., Zixiang Xiong, Sun-Yuan Kung
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.04.2009; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Channels; Coding; Coding, codes; Communication channels; Communication networks; Complexity; Compressing; Correlation; Correlation analysis; Data compression; Decoding; distributed compression; distributed source coding; Encoding; Exact sciences and technology; Information management; Information theory; Information, signal and communications theory; low complexity; multicast; Network coding; Network topology; Networks; Random variables; Relaying; Relays; Robustness; Signal and communications theory; Source coding; Systems, networks and services of telecommunications; Telecommunications; Telecommunications and information theory; Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments); low complexity; Relaying; Binary channel; Source coding; Distributed source signal; Data broadcast; Information dissemination; Implementation; Multicast; Linear coding; Information source; distributed source coding; Network coding; Robustness; distributed compression
• ISSN: 0018-9448; 1557-9654
• DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2009.2013016

This paper considers the problem of communicating correlated information from multiple source nodes over a network of noiseless channels to multiple destination nodes, where each destination node wants to recover all sources. The problem involves a joint consideration of distributed compression and network information relaying. Although the optimal rate region has been theoretically characterized, it was not clear how to design practical communication schemes with low complexity. This work provides a partial solution to this problem by proposing a low-complexity scheme for the special case with two sources whose correlation is characterized by a binary symmetric channel. Our scheme is based on a careful combination of linear syndrome-based Slepian-Wolf coding and random linear mixing (network coding). It is in general suboptimal; however, its low complexity and robustness to network dynamics make it suitable for practical implementation.