Cascade Source Coding With a Side Information Vending Machine

Abstract

The model of a side information "vending machine" (VM) accounts for scenarios in which the measurement of side information sequences can be controlled via the selection of cost-constrained actions. In this paper, the three-node cascade source coding problem is studied under the assumption that a side information VM is available and the intermediate and/or at the end node of the cascade. A single-letter characterization of the achievable trade-off among the transmission rates, the distortions in the reconstructions at the intermediate and at the end node, and the cost for acquiring the side information is derived for a number of relevant special cases. It is shown that a joint design of the description of the source and of the control signals used to guide the selection of the actions at downstream nodes is generally necessary for an efficient use of the available communication links. In particular, for all the considered models, layered coding strategies prove to be optimal, whereby the base layer fulfills two network objectives: determining the actions of downstream nodes and simultaneously providing a coarse description of the source. Design of the optimal coding strategy is shown via examples to depend on both the network topology and the action costs. Examples also illustrate the involved performance trade-offs across the network.

Distributed and Cascade Lossy Source Coding With a Side Information “Vending Machine”

“…This characterization is obtained under the assumption that the side information is available causally at Node 3. It is mentioned that, following the submission of this paper, the analysis of the case with noncausal side information at Node 3 was carried out in [15].…”

“…We recall that side information is here assumed to be available causally at the decoder (Node 3). The corresponding model with noncausal side information is studied in [15]. We then present the characterization of the corresponding rate-distortion-cost performance in Section III-B.…”

On cascade source coding with a side information “vending machine”

“…The proof of converse is provided in [13,Appendix B]. The achievability follows as a combination of the techniques proposed in [1] and [10, Theorem 1].…”

Information embedding on actions

“…In [2][3], a related channel coding problem is studied in which the encoder in a point-to-point channel can take actions to affect, or probe, the state of a channel. Generalizations of these works include models with additional design constraints [4], [5], with adaptive actions [6], with memory [7], [5] and with multiple terminals [8][9] [10]. To illustrate the problem of interest in this paper, consider the example of a link in which the encoder takes actions to probe the channel by sending a training packet.…”