  This paper studies the optimization of zero-delay analog mappings in a
network setting that involves distributed coding. The cost surface is known to
be non-convex, and known greedy methods tend to get trapped in poor locally
optimal solutions that depend heavily on initialization. We derive an
optimization algorithm based on the principles of "deterministic annealing", a
powerful global optimization framework that has been successfully employed in
several disciplines, including, in our recent work, to a simple zero-delay
analog communications problem. We demonstrate strict superiority over the
descent based methods, as well as present example mappings whose properties
lend insights on the workings of the solution and relations with digital
distributed coding.
