Optimal matching in wireless sensor networks

We investigate the design of a wireless sensor network (WSN), where distributed source coding (DSC) for pairs of nodes is used. More precisely, we minimize the compression sum rate for noiseless channels and the sum power for noisy orthogonal channels in a context of pairwise DSC. In both cases, the minimization can be separated into a matching problem and a pairwise rate-power control problem (that admits a simple closed-form solution). Using this separation, we obtain an optimization procedure of polynomial (in the number of nodes in the network) complexity. Finally, we show that the overall optimization can be readily interpreted. For noiseless channels, the optimization matches close nodes whereas, for noisy channels, there is a tradeoff between matching close nodes and matching nodes with different distances to the sink. We provide examples of the proposed optimization method based on empirical measures. We show that the matching technique provides substantial gains in either storage capacity or power consumption for the WSN.