Cooperative Transmission of Correlated Gaussian Sources

Cooperation of wireless users is known to provide substantial improvements in channel reliability and in end-to- end distortion when nodes have access to independent sources. In this paper we investigate the effect of cooperation and distributed compression when the sources are correlated. For distributed compression, realizing that each compressed stream may not reach the destination due to fading, we first derive the achievable rate-distortion pairs for Gaussian sources to have robust descriptions. Then we show how user cooperation can be coupled with robust distributed compression to further improve the end-to-end distortion for correlated sources.