Distributed Source Coding for Interactive Function Computation
Nan Ma, Prakash Ishwar
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30 pages, 6 figures. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Parts of this work were presented at 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT'08)
A two-terminal interactive distributed source coding problem with alternating messages for function computation at both locations is studied. For any number of messages, a computable characterization of the rate region is provided in terms of single-letter information measures. While interaction is useless in terms of the minimum sum-rate for lossless source reproduction at one or both locations, the gains can be arbitrarily large for function computation even when the sources are independent. For a class of sources and functions, interaction is shown to be useless, even with infinite messages, when a function has to be computed at only one location, but is shown to be useful, if functions have to be computed at both locations. For computing the Boolean AND function of two independent Bernoulli sources at both locations, an achievable infinite-message sum-rate with infinitesimal-rate messages is derived in terms of a two-dimensional definite integral and a rate-allocation curve. A general framework for multiterminal interactive function computation based on an information exchange protocol which successively switches among different distributed source coding configurations is developed. For networks with a star topology, multiple rounds of interactive coding is shown to decrease the scaling law of the total network rate by an order of magnitude as the network grows.
In a series of papers N. Ma and P. Ishwar (2011-13) considered a range of distributed source coding problems that arise in the context of iterative computation of functions, characterizing the region of achievable communication rates. We consider the problems of interactive computation of functions by two terminals and interactive computation in a collocated network, showing that the rate regions for both these problems can be achieved using several rounds of polar-coded transmissions.
The three-node multiterminal lossy source coding problem is investigated. We derive an inner bound to the general rate-distortion region of this problem which is a natural extension of the seminal work by Kaspi'85 on the interactive two-terminal source coding problem. It is shown that this (rather involved) inner bound contains several rate-distortion regions of some relevant source coding settings. In this way, besides the non-trivial extension of the interactive two terminal problem, our results can be seen as a generalization and hence unification of several previous works in the field. Spe…
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