Distributed signal processing and communications: on the interaction of sources and channels

Distributed ways of communicating, processing, and sensing are replacing more traditional centralized architectures. An early example of this revolution in distributed communications is appearing in the form of sensor networks, which are densely distributed networks of embedded signal sensors, controls and processors. These nodes could be simple signal sensors, but could also be cameras and microphones. In this distributed scenario, there are several interesting topics to investigate that span from traditional signal processing problems (i.e. sampling, compression, detection) to communication and information theory (i.e. transmission protocols, capacity bounds for ad-hoc networks). This paper reviews some recent results on the topic of source representations and distributed source coding and transmission.