Distributed coordination in network information theory

Constructing a large-scale wireless data network is spectacularly expensive. It is therefore important to understand how to efficiently utilize the physical infrastructure and available battery power, which are expensive system resources. Unfortunately, we currently understand very little about efficient communication in a distributed environment. In distributed wireless networks, there appears to be an interesting and complex trade-off between trying to take advantage of independent noisy signals at different relays and closely coordinating relay transmissions to a receiver. Designing the right structure for efficient communication, by choice of source transmission codebook and relay terminal processing, is the important and difficult problem on which we focus. We use an information theoretic framework to study several very simple multiple terminal networks, focusing exclusively on single source, single destination networks where communication must take place through intermediate nodes. Our goal is to determine how much data we can get reliably from source to destination, placing no importance on delay or computational complexity. The core problem then involves distributed detection at the intermediate nodes and coordination in relaying information to the destination.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Schein, Brett E. (Brett Eric)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert Gallager.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16786

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16786