CCF- Unified View of Multiterminal Source Coding

CCF-多终端源代码统一视图

• 批准号: 0830583
• 负责人: Richard Blahut
• 金额: $ 19.89万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2010-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0830583&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CCF; Unified; View; Multiterminal; Source

In a variety of applications, such as weather monitoring, smart buildings, and manufacturing systems, a network of sensors, each with a communication constraint, is remotely deployed with the goal of making collective inference. However, the governing principle, as well as the performance limit, of such sensor (information source) networks is not well understood. Consequently, most practical systems are designed conservatively, allowing significant room for future improvement and cost reduction. In this backdrop, the investigators identify certain fundamental principles underlying network (multiterminal) source coding, and study performance bounds in the spirit of Shannon. This research entails several benefits: (1) attractive economic returns on research investment due to design benchmarking; (2) unified conceptual understanding of a large class of network coding problems; (3) development of academic materials and courses for training engineers in design and maintenance of distributed systems.The investigators give a canonical theory characterizing the asymptotic performance bound for a broad class of multiterminal source coding problems. In particular, they employ a unifying distortion-independent coding strategy, which manifests distortion only upon suitable post-processing. Importantly, the ubiquitous notion of single-letter description is connected to a certain graphical representation; existence of such description is guaranteed if the corresponding graph admits no cycles. As a consequence, the investigators find a single-letter solution to the hitherto-open single-helper problem. On the contrary, graphs with cycles, seen, for example, in the famous Berger-Tung problem, likely admit no single-letter solution. Accordingly, the Berger-Tung bound is conjectured to be loose, and work towards a conclusive answer is in progress. However, in absence of a single-letter description, the canonical theory still provides a general road map towards a computable description, and tractable computational algorithms.

在天气监测、智能建筑和制造系统等各种应用中，远程部署传感器网络，每个传感器都有通信限制，目标是进行集体推理。然而，这样的传感器（信息源）网络的管理原则，以及性能限制还没有得到很好的理解。因此，大多数实际系统的设计都很保守，为未来的改进和成本降低提供了很大的空间。在这种背景下，研究人员确定了网络（多端）信源编码的某些基本原则，并以香农的精神研究了性能界限。该研究带来了以下几个好处：（1）由于设计基准，研究投资具有吸引力的经济回报：（2）对一大类网络编码问题的统一概念理解;（三）开发学术材料和课程，用于培训分布式系统设计和维护的工程师。研究人员给出了一个规范理论，描述了广泛类型的多终端的渐进性能界限源代码问题。特别是，他们采用了统一的失真独立的编码策略，这表明失真只有在适当的后处理。重要的是，普遍存在的单字母描述的概念与某种图形表示有关;如果相应的图不允许循环，则可以保证这种描述的存在。因此，研究人员找到了一个单字母的解决方案，迄今为止开放的单一助手的问题。相反，具有循环的图，例如著名的伯格-董问题，可能不承认单字母的解决方案。因此，Berger-Tung界限被证明是松散的，并且朝着结论性答案的工作正在进行中。然而，在缺乏单字母描述的情况下，规范理论仍然提供了一个通往可计算描述和易处理的计算算法的一般路线图。