Maximizing Sample Rate for Distributed Source Coding over Multiple Access Channels

We investigate the problem of maximizing the sample rate at the transmitters in a wireless network using distributed source coding (DSC) and lossless transmission. With the consideration of circuit power consumption, average power constraints and DSC rate constraints, we study different orthogonal multiple access channels (MACs) and prove that the optimal orthogonal MAC is either TDMA or CDMA, depending on the joint entropy of the correlated sources, average power constraints, circuit power consumption, noise power and path loss.