Sending a Bivariate Gaussian Source over a Gaussian MAC with Feedback

We study the power-versus-distortion trade-off for the transmission of a memoryless bivariate Gaussian source over a two-to-one Gaussian multiple-access channel with perfect causal feedback. In this problem, each of two separate transmitters observes a different component of a memoryless bivariate Gaussian source as well as the feedback from the channel output of the previous time-instants. Based on the observed source sequence and the feedback, each transmitter then describes its source component to the common receiver via an average-power constrained Gaussian multiple-access channel. From the resulting channel output, the receiver wishes to reconstruct both source components with the least possible expected squared-error distortion. We study the set of distortion pairs that can be achieved by the receiver on the two source components. We present sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for the achievability of a distortion pair. These conditions are expressed in terms of the source correlation and of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the channel. In several cases the necessary conditions and sufficient conditions coincide. This allows us to show that if the channel SNR is below a certain threshold, then an uncoded transmission scheme that ignores the feedback is optimal. Thus, below this SNR-threshold feedback is useless. We also derive the precise high-SNR asymptotics of optimal schemes.