Coding and routing complexity in sensor networks

This paper introduces a particular network source coding problem for sensor networks. The problem consists of transmitting information between a set of source-destination pairs over a network where the nodes are correlated. When the underlying graph structure is a tree we give a complete characterization of the achievable rate region and discusses the role of graphical models and in particular the junction tree in determining routing paths for cases where the underlying graph structure has cycles. The communication complexity of learning the statistics of the source from observation data and computing the routing spanning tree in a distributed manner is determined.