Hierarchical distributed source coding scheme and optimal transmission scheduling for wireless sensor networks

Distributed source coding (DSC) can be used to compress multiple correlated sensor measurements. These sensors send their compressed data to a central station for joint decoding. However, the issue on designing an optimal transmission scheduling scheme of DSC packets for WSNs have not been well addressed in the literature. In this work, we proposed a novel DSC coding scheme - hierarchical coding scheme, which exploits inter-node coding dependency in sensing-driven and correlated manner. In addition, the interaction between hierarchical coding topology and transmission is considered. We optimize the transmission schedule of DSC nodes to achieve better decoding quality. Our approach can be practically applied to any WSN topologies with correlated source coding nodes. Simulation shows that our work can achieve higher decoding accuracy and compression rate than previous approaches, and the decoding accuracy would not have much degradation under the error-prone wireless environment.