The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Source-channel coding for coordination over a noisy two-node network
Author:	Obead, Sarah A.
View Online:	njit-etd2017-027 (xi, 69 pages ~ 1.2 MB pdf)
Department:	Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Telecommunications
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Kliewer, Joerg (Committee chair) Abdi, Ali (Committee member) Simeone, Osvaldo (Committee member)
Date:	2017-01
Keywords:	Noisy two-node network Shannon's source-channel separation theorem
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Recently, the concept of coordinating actions between distributed agents has emerged in the information theory literature. It was first introduced by Cuff in 2008 for the point-to-point case of coordination. However, Cuff’s work and the vast majority of the follow-up research are based on establishing coordination over noise-free communication links. In contrast, this thesis investigates the open problem of coordination over noisy point-to-point links. The aim of this study is to examine Shannon’s source-channel separation theorem in the context of coordination. To that end, a general joint scheme to achieve the strong notion of coordination over a discrete memoryless channel is introduced. The strong coordination notion requires that the L1 distance between the induced joint distribution of action sequences selected by the nodes and a prescribed joint distribution vanishes exponentially fast with the sequence block length. From the general joint scheme, three special cases are constructed, one of which resembles Shannon’s separation scheme. As a surprising result, the proposed joint scheme has been found to be able to perform better than a strictly separate scheme. Finally, the last part of the thesis provides simulation results to confirm the presented argument based on comparing the achievable rate regions for the scheme resembling Shannon’s separation and a special case of the general joint scheme.