A practical approach to joint network-source coding

We are interested in how to best communicate a real valued source to a number of destinations (sinks) over a network with capacity constraints in a collective fidelity metric over all the sinks, a problem which we call joint network-source coding. It is demonstrated that multiple description codes in conjunction with proper diversity routing provide a powerful solution to joint network-source coding. A systematic optimization approach is proposed. It consists of optimizing the network routing given a multiple description code and designing optimal multiple description code for the corresponding optimized routes.