A distributed rate allocation algorithm for Slepian-Wolf coding based data aggregation in wireless sensor networks

This paper considers the Slepian-Wolf coding based energy-minimization rate allocation problem in a wireless sensor network (WSN) and propose a distributed rate allocation algorithm to solve the problem. The proposed distributed algorithm is based on an existing centralized rate allocation algorithm which has a high computational complexity. To reduce the computational complexity of the centralized algorithm and make the rate allocation performable in a distributed manner, we make necessary modifications to the centralized algorithm by reducing the number of sets in calculating the average energy consumption cost and limiting the number of conditional nodes that a set can use. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed algorithm can significantly reduce the computational time when compared with the existing centralized algorithm at the cost of the overall energy consumption for data transmission and the total amount of data transmitted in the network.