Uncoded Transmission Is Exactly Optimal for a Simple Gaussian “Sensor” Network

A single memoryless Gaussian source is observed by many terminals, subject to independent Gaussian observation noises. The terminals are linked to a fusion center via a standard Gaussian multiple-access channel. The fusion center needs to recover the underlying Gaussian source with respect to mean-squared error. In this correspondence, a theorem of Witsenhausen is shown to imply that an optimal communication strategy is uncoded transmission, i.e., each terminal's channel input is merely a scaled version of its noisy observation.