On the capacity of the reachback channel in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of reachback communication in wireless sensor networks: multiple sensors are deployed on a field, and they collect local measurements of some random process which then need to be encoded and reproduced at a remote location. In this paper we present a number of information theoretic bounds on the performance of a distributed transmission array that is formed by a large number of cheap, unreliable sensors. We formulate this problem in terms of classical network information theory concepts, formulation which leads us to consider two important cases: transmission of correlated sources over multiple independent channels, and rate/distortion with separate encoders.