Low-complexity cooperation with correlated sources: Diversity order analysis

Wireless sensor networks, which consist of numerous devices that take measurements of a physical phenomenon, are commonly used to observe phenomena that are correlated in space. In this paper, we devise a low-complexity coding scheme for correlated sources based on Slepian-Wolf compression, and analyze its performance in terms of diversity order. The main idea of this scheme is to use the correlated measurements as a substitute for relay links. Although we show that the asymptotic diversity order is limited by the constant correlation factor, we give experimental results that show excellent performance over practical ranges of SNR.