Joint Coding/Routing Optimization for Correlated Sources in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks

This paper studies a joint coding/routing optimization between network lifetime and rate-distortion, by applying information theory to wireless visual sensor networks for correlated sources. Arbitrary coding (distributed source coding and network coding) from both combinatorial optimization and information theory could make significant progress towards the performance limit of information networks and tractable. Also, multipath routing can spread energy utilization across nodes within the entire network to keep a potentially longer lifetime, and solve the wireless contention issues by the splitting traffic. The objective function not only keeps a total energy consumption of encoding power, transmission power, and reception power minimized, but ensures the information received by sink nodes to approximately reconstruct the visual field. Based on the localized Slepian-Wolf coding and network coding-based multipath routing, the balance problem between distortion (capacity) and lifetime (costs) is modeled as an optimization formulation with a distributed solution. Through a primal decomposition, a two-level optimization is relaxed with Lagrangian dualization and solved with the gradient algorithm. The low-level optimization problem is decomposed into a secondary master dual problem (encoding, energy, and congestion prices update) with four cross-layer subproblems: a rate control problem, a channel contention problem, a distortion control problem, and an energy conservation problem. Numerical results validate the convergence and performance of the proposed algorithm.