Abstract—We propose a sequential framework for the distributed multiple-sensor estimation and coding problem that decomposes the problem into a series of side-informed source coding problems and enables construction of good codecs. Our construction relies on a separation result for the simplified scenario where information from one sensor is to be sent to the CP that already has information regarding the desired signal. We show that the optimal encoder decoder combination, in this setting, can be decomposed, without loss in performance, into two steps: A first preprocessing step to extract relevant information from the indirect observation with consideration of the side information, followed by a second step of side-informed encoding of the preprocessed output. A recursive exploit of the decomposition coupled with side-informed transform coding allows us to construct encoders by reusing scalar Wyner–Ziv codecs. We develop a numerical procedure for obtaining bounds delineating the...