Rate Distortion Codes in Sensor Networks: A System-level Analysis

This paper provides a system-level analysis of a scalable distributed sensing modelfor networked sensors. In our system model, a data center acquires datafrom a bunch of L sensors which each independently encode their noisy observations of an original binary sequence, and transmit their encoded data sequences to the data center at a combined rate R, which is limited. Supposing that the sensors use independent LDGM rate distortion codes,we show that the system performance can be evaluated for any given finite R when the number of sensors L goes to infinity. The analysis shows how the optimal strategy for the distributed sensing problem changesat critical values of the data rate R or the noise level.