Two Multi-Terminal Communication Problems: Distributed Estimation and Source-Channel Broadcast

Two Multi-Terminal Communication Problems: Distributed Estimation and Source-Channel Broadcast by Vinod Malathi Prabhakaran Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering-Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Designated Emphasis in Communication, Computation, and Statistics University of California, Berkeley Professors Kannan Ramchandran and David Tse, Co-chairs A major success of information theory is a more or less satisfactory understanding of point-to-point communication (where a single source of information wants to convey this information to a single sink). However, many questions remain open when there is more than one source or sink of information. This dissertation addresses two classes of such problems. The first set of problems is motivated by wireless sensor networks where a large number of sensors collect potentially noisy data about an underlying physical phenomenon and communicate a compressed form of the data to a fusion centre which attempts to reconstruct some aspects of the original source of data. One model for