An achievable rate region for distributed source coding and dispersive information routing

This paper considers the problem of optimal multi-hop routing of correlated sources over a network with multiple sinks and arbitrary network demands. We recently introduced a new routing paradigm in [10] called dispersive information routing (DIR), wherein the intermediate nodes are allowed to split a packet and forward a subset of the received bits on each forward path. DIR ensures that each sink receives just the information it requires to decode the sources it intends to reconstruct, and thereby outperforms conventional routing techniques in the literature. We proposed an encoding scheme called power binning which achieves complete rate region and the minimum cost under this paradigm when each sink is allowed to receive packets only from the sources it wants to reconstruct. This paper considers the optimum encoding scheme when every source can (possibly) communicate with every sink irrespective of what the sinks reconstruct. This generalization happens to be considerably more complex and we derive an achievable rate region and an associated achievable cost using principles from distributed source coding and multiple descriptions encoding.