In many resource allocation problems, a centralized controller needs to award some resource to a user selected from a collection of distributed users with the goal of maximizing the utility the user would receive from the resource. This can be modeled as the controller computing an extremum of the distributed users’ utilities. The overhead rate necessary to enable the controller to reproduce the users’ local state can be prohibitively high. An approach to reduce this overhead is interactive communication wherein rate savings are achieved by tolerating an increase in delay. In this paper, we consider the design of a simple achievable scheme based on successive refinements of scalar quantization at each user. The optimal quantization policy is computed via a dynamic program and we demonstrate that tolerating a small increase in delay can yield significant rate savings. We then consider two simpler quantization policies to investigate the scaling properties of the rate-delay tradeoffs. Using a combination of these simpler policies, the performance of the optimal policy can be closely approximated with lower computational costs.
Let (X_ i , Y_ i ), i= 1,2 , be a sequence of independent, identically distributed bivariate random variables and consider the following communication situation. The X component of the process is observed at some location, say A , while the Y component is observed at a different location, say B . The X(Y) component of the process has to be reproduced at location B(A) . It is desired to find the amount of information that should be exchanged between the two locations, so that the distortions incurred will not exceed some predetermined tolerance. A "single-letter characterization" of a certain region **** ^ K R ^ 4 of rates and distortions is given. This region contains (all, and only) the achievable rates and distortions for the special case where block coding is used and the information is conveyed through a one-way link that can switch direction only K times per block. A two-terminal interactive distributed source coding problem with alternating messages for function computation at both locations is studied. For any number of messages, a computable characterization of the rate region is provided in terms of single-letter information measures. While interaction is useless in terms of the minimum sum-rate for lossless source reproduction at one or both locations, the gains can be arbitrarily large for function computation even when the sources are independent. For a class of sources and functions, interaction is shown to be useless, even with infinite messages, when a function has to be computed at only one location, but is shown to be useful, if functions have to be computed at both locations. For computing the Boolean AND function of two independent Bernoulli sources at both locations, an achievable infinite-message sum-rate with infinitesimal-rate messages is derived in terms of a 2-D definite integral and a rate-allocation curve. The benefit of interaction is highlighted in multiterminal function computation problem through examples. For networks with a star topology, multiple rounds of interactive coding is shown to decrease the scaling law of the total network rate by an order of magnitude as the network grows. In 1985 Kaspi provided a single-letter characterization of the sum-rate-distortion function for a two-way lossy source coding problem in which two terminals send multiple messages back and forth with the goal of reproducing each other's sources. Yet, the question remained whether more messages can strictly improve the sum-rate-distortion function. Viewing the sum-rate as a functional of the distortions and the joint source distribution and leveraging its convex-geometric properties, we construct an example which shows that two messages can strictly improve the one-message (Wyner-Ziv) rate-distortion function. The example also shows that the ratio of the one-message rate to the two-message sum-rate can be arbitrarily large and simultaneously the ratio of the backward rate to the forward rate in the two-message sum-rate can be arbitrarily small.