DISCUS is an acronym for Distributed Source Coding Using Syndromes.

Introduction

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DISCUS is a particular scheme used in source coding which is designed to achieve the Slepian-Wolf bound by using channel codes.

History

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DISCUS was invented by researchers SS Pradhan and K Ramachandran, in their seminal paper Distributed source coding using syndromes (DISCUS): design and construction published in the Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on, 2003.

Principle

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DISCUS is a source coding scheme for correlated sources, which are common in the case of sensor readings from a dense group of wireless sensor networks. DISCUS tries to model a particular source correlation as a channel noise, and tries to find a channel code that performs well for this channel noise. This channel code, is then proved to be the best code that can perform as a source code for the correlated data sources.

Variations

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Many variations of DISCUS are presented in related literature. One such popular scheme is the Channel Code Partitioning scheme, which is an a-priori scheme, to reach the Slepian-Wolf bound. Many papers illustrate simulations and experiments on channel code partitioning using the Turbo codes, Hamming codes and Irregular Repeat Accumulate Codes.

Information theory | Wireless sensor network