Joint Network-Source Coding: An Achievable Region with Diversity Routing

Nima Sarshar, Xiaolin Wu

Abstract: We are interested in how to best communicate a (usually 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. Unlike the lossless network coding problem, lossy reconstruction of the source at the sinks is permitted. We make a first attempt to characterize the set of all distortions achievable by a set of sinks in a given network. While the entire region of all achievable distortions remains largely an open problem, we find a large, non-trivial subset of it using ideas in multiple description coding. The achievable region is derived over all balanced multiple-description codes and over all network flows, while the network nodes are allowed to forward and duplicate data packets.