Distributed Quantization for Partially Cooperating Sensors Using the Information Bottleneck Method

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper proposes distributed (greedy) quantization procedures for partially cooperating sensors using the Information Bottleneck method. 

The studied model is interesting, and overall the exposition is good. On the technical sound, the results seem correct to this Reviewer. I recommend Accept.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your constructive criticism and appreciate the time you have spent for your review.  As you made no suggestions for changes in the manuscript, only minor changes regarding typos and formatting issues have been made.

Sincerely,
Steffen Steiner

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper considers the CEO problem with partial cooperation. The overall presentation is good. The paper gives some good background on the topic and represents the work and contributions in a good flow.

From technical viewpoint, the work sounds. The contributions, though not very novel and breathtaking, seem to be original and given in good details. I would however suggest to consider the comments of other reviewers with respect to the novelty of the work further into account, as I am not an expert in this topic. The conclusions are moreover intuitive.

There is a minor issue regarding the literature review: The cited literature seems to be quite old. This is partially due to the fact that the topic was not investigated recently very extensive, I would however suggest that the author include some more recent literature in the literature review. I could also imagine that there are bunch of related studies in the literature of distributed lossy source coding, and cooperative joint source-channel coding which could be further cited.

Independent from the topic of this work (CEO), there is also a conceptually related problem in signal processing called multiple measurement vectors (MMV) problem which considers the same problem for linear measurements and sparse prior. Though I do not expect the authors to include relations to MMV in their study (as it is out of the scope of this work), I could suggest them to also consider it while revising literature review, since there has been a rather rich literature on MMV.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We would like to thank you for your constructive criticism and appreciate the time you have spent for your review. 

We re-scanned the literature and did not find any recently published related articles. Therefore, we decided not to extend the literature review. However, some minor changes regarding typos and formatting issues have been made.

Sincerely,
Steffen Steiner