Joint optimization of power scheduling and rate-distortion performance in one-helper problem

We consider the many-help-one problem, also called 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 other correlated source. Both correlated sources communicate information about their observations to the FC through an orthogonal multiple access channel (MAC) without cooperating with each other. First, we characterize the optimal tradeoff between the transmission cost, that is, power, and the distortion D. Then, we consider a joint optimization of source coding and power scheduling from an information theory perspective, where the power scheduling is verified using Shannon capacity formula and the source-coding problem is analyzed using rate-distortion theory. We show that the joint optimization in the Gaussian one-helper problem can be solved analytically. We provide closed-form expressions for the optimal distortion and the optimal power scheduling in terms of the cost weights. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper was presented in part at the IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC2007, Glasgow, Scotland, 24–28 June 2007.