An Analysis of Performance Improvement by a Helper for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the core component in the big data era. Due to the unreliable transmission environment, it is significantly useful to introduce a helper to refine the system performance. To begin with, we formulate the system model of WSNs as a problem of multiterminal source coding. Subsequently, we propose a 3D distributed compress-bin scheme and derive a corresponding inner bound by analyzing the expected rate-distortion. Finally, we investigate the performance improvement of a helper by comparing the derived inner bound with the Berger-Tung inner bound and through simulation. Both the theoretical bounds and simulation results indicate that a helper can obviously improve the system performance.