Lossy Distributed Source Coding With Side Information

In a typical sensor network scenario a goal is to monitor a spatio-temporal process through a number of inexpensive sensing nodes, the key parameter being the fidelity at which the process has to be estimated at distant locations. The authors study such a scenario in which multiple encoders transmit their correlated data at finite rates to a distant and common decoder. In particular, they derive inner and outer bounds on the rate region for the random field to be estimated with a given mean distortion.