  In a decentralized and self-configuring network, the communication devices
are considered as autonomous decision-makers that sense their environment and
that implement optimal transmission schemes. It is essential that these
autonomous devices cooperate and coordinate their actions, to ensure the
reliability of the transmissions and the stability of the network. We study a
point-to-point scenario in which the encoder and the decoder implement
decentralized policies that are coordinated. The coordination is measured in
terms of empirical frequency of symbols of source and channel. The encoder and
the decoder perform a coding scheme such that the empirical distribution of the
symbols is close to a target joint probability distribution. We characterize
the set of achievable target probability distributions for a point-to-point
source-channel model, in which the encoder is non-causal and the decoder is
strictly causal i.e., it returns an action based on the observation of the past
channel outputs. The objectives of the encoder and of the decoder, are captured
by some utility function, evaluated with respect to the set of achievable
target probability distributions. In this article, we investigate the
maximization problem of a utility function that is common to both encoder and
decoder. We show that the compression and the transmission of information are
particular cases of the empirical coordination.
