On Network Functional Compression

In this paper, we consider different aspects of the problem of compressing for function computation across a network, which we call network functional compression. In network functional compression, computation of a function (or, some functions) of sources located at certain nodes in a network is desired at receiver(s). The rate region of this problem has been considered in the literature under certain restrictive assumptions, particularly in terms of the network topology, the functions, and the characteristics of the sources. In this paper, we present results that significantly relax these assumptions. For a one-stage tree network, we characterize a rate region by introducing a necessary and sufficient condition for any achievable coloring-based coding scheme called coloring connectivity condition. We also propose a modularized coding scheme based on graph colorings to perform arbitrarily closely to rate lower bounds. For a general tree network, we provide a rate lower bound based on graph entropies and show that, this bound is tight in the case of having independent sources. In particular, we show that, in a general tree network case with independent sources, to achieve the rate lower bound, intermediate nodes should perform computations. However, for a family of functions and random variables, which we call chain-rule proper sets, it is sufficient to have no computations at intermediate nodes to perform arbitrarily closely to the rate lower bound. In addition, we consider practical issues of coloring-based coding schemes and propose an efficient algorithm to compute a minimum entropy coloring of a characteristic graph under some conditions on source distributions and/or the desired function. Finally, extensions of these results for cases of having feedback and lossy function computations are discussed.