Abstract-This work focuses on the minimum transmission energy required for communicating a pair of correlated Gaussian sources over a two-user Gaussian broadcast channel with noiseless and causal channel output feedback (GBCF). We study the fundamental limit on the required transmission energy for broadcasting a pair of source samples, such that each source can be reconstructed at its respective receiver to within a target distortion, when the source-channel bandwidth ratio is not restricted. We derive a lower bound and three distinct upper bounds on the minimum required energy. For the upper bounds we analyze three transmission schemes: Two schemes are based on separate source-channel coding, and apply coding over multiple samples of source pairs. The third scheme is based on joint source-channel coding obtained by extending the Ozarow-Leung (OL) transmission scheme, which applies uncoded linear transmission. Numerical simulations show that despite its simplicity, the energy-distortion tradeoff of the OL-based scheme is close to that of the better separation-based scheme, which indicates that the OL scheme is attractive for energy-efficient source transmission over GBCFs.
I. INTRODUCTIONWe study the energy-distortion tradeoff (EDT) for the transmission of a correlated pair of Gaussian sources over a twouser Gaussian broadcast channel (GBC) with noiseless causal feedback, referred to as the GBCF. EDT, recently proposed for the multiple-access channel (MAC) and the point-to-point channel in [1], characterizes the minimum energy-per-source sample required to achieve a target distortion pair at the receivers, without constraining the source-channel bandwidth ratio. In many practical scenarios, e.g., satellite broadcasting [2], sensor networks measuring physical processes [3], and in particular wireless body-area sensor networks [4], an extremely high energy efficiency is required for broadcasting correlated observations, while the available power is limited. It follows that there is a strong motivation for studying the EDT for broadcasting correlated sources, and in the present work we focus on EDT for feedback-assisted scenarios, represented by the GBCF.It is well known that, for lossy source transmission over memoryless Gaussian point-to-point channels, with or without feedback, when the bandwidth ratio is fixed and the average power per channel use is limited, separate source and channel coding (SSCC) achieves the minimum possible average distortion [5, Thm. 3]. In [1, Cor. 1] it is further shown that SSCC is optimal in the EDT sense as well: For any target distortion level, the minimal transmission energy is achieved by optimal lossy compression followed by the most energy efficient channel coding.