Communicating the Difference of Correlated Gaussian Sources Over a MAC

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of transmitting the difference of two jointly Gaussian sources over a two-user additive Gaussian noise multiple access channel (MAC). The goal is to recover this difference within an average mean squared error distortion criterion. Each transmitter has access to only one of the two Gaussian sources and is limited by an average power constraint. In this work, a lattice coding scheme that achieves a distortion within a constant of a distortion lower bound is presented if the signal to noise ratio (SNR) is greater than a threshold. Further, uncoded transmission is shown to be worse in performance to lattice coding methods. An alternative lattice coding scheme is presented that can potentially improve on the performance of uncoded transmission.