Source-channel coding for coordination over a noisy two-node network

Recently, the concept of coordinating actions between distributed agents has emerged in the information theory literature. It was first introduced by Cuff in 2008 for the point-to-point case of coordination. However, Cuff’s work and the vast majority of the follow-up research are based on establishing coordination over noise-free communication links. In contrast, this thesis investigates the open problem of coordination over noisy point-to-point links. The aim of this study is to examine Shannon’s source-channel separation theorem in the context of coordination. To that end, a general joint scheme to achieve the strong notion of coordination over a discrete memoryless channel is introduced. The strong coordination notion requires that the L_1 distance between the induced joint distribution of action sequences selected by the nodes and a prescribed joint distribution vanishes exponentially fast with the sequence block length. From the general joint scheme, three special cases are constructed, one of which resembles Shannon’s separation scheme. As a surprising result, the proposed joint scheme has been found to be able to perform better than a strictly separate scheme. Finally, the last part of the thesis provides simulation results to confirm the presented argument based on comparing the achievable rate regions for the scheme resembling Shannon’s separation and a special case of the general joint scheme.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science in Telecommunications - (M.S.)

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year

2017

Author dc:creator

• Obead, Sarah A.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Joerg Kliewer
• Ali Abdi
• Osvaldo Simeone

• Noisy two-node network
• Shannon's source-channel separation theorem
• Digital Communications and Networking

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/theses/6

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.njit.edu:theses-1005