  Traditional distributed source coding rarely considers the possible link
between separate encoders. However, the broadcast nature of wireless
communication in sensor networks provides a free gossip mechanism which can be
used to simplify encoding/decoding and reduce transmission power. Using this
broadcast advantage, we present a new two-encoder scheme which imitates the
ping-pong game and has a successive approximation structure. For the quadratic
Gaussian case, we prove that this scheme is successively refinable on the
{sum-rate, distortion pair} surface, which is characterized by the
rate-distortion region of the distributed two-encoder source coding. A
potential energy saving over conventional distributed coding is also
illustrated. This ping-pong distributed coding idea can be extended to the
multiple encoder case and provides the theoretical foundation for a new class
of distributed image coding method in wireless scenarios.
