A hybrid communication network with a common analog signal and an independent digital data stream as input to each node in a multiple access network is considered. The receiver/base-station has to estimate the analog signal with a given fidelity, and decode the digital streams with a low error probability. Treating the analog signal as a common state process, we set up a joint state estimation and communication problem in a Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) with additive state. The transmitters have non-causal knowledge of the state process, and need to communicate independent data streams in addition to facilitating state estimation at the receiver. We first provide a complete characterization of the optimal trade-off between mean squared error distortion performance in estimating the state and the data rates for the message streams from two transmitting nodes. This is then generalized to an N-sender MAC. To this end, we show a natural connection between the state-dependent MAC model and a hybrid multi-sensor network in which a common source phenomenon is observed at N transmitting nodes. Each node encodes the source observations as well as an independent message stream over a Gaussian MAC without any state process. The receiver is interested estimating the source and all the messages. Again the distortion-rate performance is characterized.
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