  We propose a cross-layer strategy for resource allocation between spatially
correlated sources in the uplink of multi-cell FDMA networks. Our objective is
to find the optimum power and channel to sources, in order to minimize the
maximum distortion achieved by any source in the network. Given that the
network is multi-cell, the inter-cell interference must also be taken into
consideration. This resource allocation problem is NP-hard and the optimal
solution can only be found by exhaustive search over the entire solution space,
which is not computationally feasible. We propose a three step method to be
performed separately by the scheduler in each cell, which finds cross-layer
resource allocation in simple steps. The three- step algorithm separates the
problem into inter-cell resource management, grouping of sources for joint
decoding, and intra- cell channel assignment. For each of the steps we propose
allocation methods that satisfy different design constraints. In the
simulations we compare methods for each step of the algorithm. We also
demonstrate the overall gain of using correlation-aware resource allocation for
a typical multi-cell network of Gaussian sources. We show that, while using
correlation in compression and joint decoding can achieve 25% loss in
distortion over independent decoding, this loss can be increased to 37% when
correlation is also utilized in resource allocation method. This significant
distortion loss motivates further work in correlation-aware resource
allocation. Overall, we find that our method achieves a 60% decrease in 5
percentile distortion compared to independent methods.
