Shared Sensing and Communications in Sensor Networks : The Multihop Case

A joint sensing/communication problem is considered for sensor networks. Herein, the channel(s) between a source and destination are the parameters to be sensed and communicated over the network. Lower bounds on the end-to-end distortion are developed for a multihop, linear network. Internode communication is assumed to be done via an encode-and-forward approach. For a many-to-one topology with two hops, data aggregation and time-division communication approaches are compared. Asymptotic in the SNR, it is shown that a time-division approach is superior