A Distributed Minimum-Distortion Routing Algorithm with In-Network Data Processing

In many wired and wireless networks, nodes process input traffic to satisfy a network constraint (e.g., a capacity constraint) and to increase the utility of data in the output flows given these constraints. In this paper we focus on the special case in which data processing is applied to satisfy capacity constraints. This occurs when the sum of the rate of the input traffic at a node exceeds the sum of the capacity of its output links, or in a more general case, when the sum of the input rates is larger than any cut capacity in the network. In this case, nodes process data to decrease the output flow rate. This decrease from input rate to output rate distorts the transmitted data, which we characterize by a distortion metric. We show that the distortion cost of distributively processing input traffic in a network can be written as the sum of the distortion at individual nodes.. We present a distributed algorithm for a data-gathering network with many sources and a data sink that routes traffic and performs in-network data processing to minimize the distortion cost. In this algorithm, each node determines its routing table based on gradient information from neighboring nodes.