Distributed Compression and Transmission with Energy Harvesting Sensors

We determine the achievable distortion region when the correlated source samples are transmitted by two energy harvesting (EH) sensor nodes to the destination over orthogonal fading channels. A time slotted system is considered in which the energy and the source samples arrive at the beginning of each time slot (TS), and both the correlation between source samples at the two nodes and fading coefficients change over time but remain constant in each TS. Assuming non-causal knowledge of these time-varying source statistics, energy arrivals and the channel gains, i.e., under the offline optimization framework, we obtain the optimal transmission and coding schemes that achieve the points on the Pareto boundary of the total distortion region. An iterative directional 2D waterfilling algorithm is proposed to obtain two specific points on this boundary.