The Multiple Access Channel with Feedback and Correlated Sources

In this paper, we investigate communication strategies for the multiple access channel with feedback and correlated sources (MACFCS). The MACFCS models a wireless sensor network scenario in which sensors distributed throughout an arbitrary random field collect correlated measurements and transmit them to a common sink. We derive achievable rate regions for the three-node MACFCS. First, we study the strategy when source coding and channel coding are combined, which we term full decoding at sources. Second, we look at several strategies when source coding and channel coding are separated, which we term full decoding at destination. From numerical computations on Gaussian channels, we see that different strategies perform better under certain source correlations and channel setups.