Source-Channel Communication in One-Helper Problem

We consider the m-helper problem for the special case of m = 1 where one source provides partial side information to the fusion center (FC) to help reconstruction of the main source signal. Both sources communicate information about their observations to the FC through an orthogonal multiple access channel (MAC) without cooperating with each other. We characterize the optimal tradeoff between the transmission cost, i.e., power, and the distortion D using Shannon's separation source and channel coding theorem. We show that the separation approach outperforms the analog forwarding approach in the 1- helper problem. We also determine the optimal power scheduling to minimize the total power consumption in the network.