  Reliable transmission of a discrete memoryless source over a multiple-relay
relay-broadcast network is considered. Motivated by sensor network
applications, it is assumed that the relays and the destinations all have
access to side information correlated with the underlying source signal. Joint
source-channel cooperative transmission is studied in which the relays help the
transmission of the source signal to the destinations by using both their
overheard signals, as in the classical channel cooperation scenario, as well as
the available correlated side information. Decode-and-forward (DF) based
cooperative transmission is considered in a network of multiple relay terminals
and two different achievability schemes are proposed: i) a regular encoding and
sliding-window decoding scheme without explicit source binning at the encoder,
and ii) a semi-regular encoding and backward decoding scheme with binning based
on the side information statistics. It is shown that both of these schemes lead
to the same source-channel code rate, which is shown to be the "source-channel
capacity" in the case of i) a physically degraded relay network in which the
side information signals are also degraded in the same order as the channel;
and ii) a relay-broadcast network in which all the terminals want to
reconstruct the source reliably, while at most one of them can act as a relay.
