Symmetrical multilevel diversity coding

Author

Roche, James R. ; Yeung, Raymond W. ; Hau, Ka Pun

Author_Institution

Center for Commun. Res., Princeton, NJ, USA

Volume

43

Issue

3

fYear

1997

fDate

5/1/1997 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1059

Lastpage

1064

Abstract

Multilevel diversity coding was introduced in recent work by Roche (1992) and Yeung (1995). In a multilevel diversity coding system, an information source is encoded by a number of encoders. There is a set of decoders, partitioned into multiple levels, with each decoder having access to a certain subset of the encoders. The reconstructions of the source by decoders within the same level are identical and are subject to the same distortion criterion. Inspired by applications in computer communication and fault-tolerant data retrieval, we study a multilevel diversity coding problem with three levels for which the connectivity between the encoders and decoders is symmetrical. We obtain a single-letter characterization of the coding rate region and show that coding by superposition is optimal for this problem. Generalizing to a symmetrical problem with an arbitrary number of levels, we derive a tight lower bound on the coding rate sum

Keywords

computer networks; decoding; rate distortion theory; software fault tolerance; source coding; coding by superposition; coding rate region; coding rate sum; computer communication; decoders; distortion criterion; fault-tolerant data retrieval; information source; multilevel diversity coding; single-letter characterization; source reconstruction; symmetrical connectivity; three level problem; tight lower bound; Application software; Computer applications; Cryptography; Decoding; Distributed computing; Fault tolerance; Information retrieval; Quantum computing; Satellite communication; Source coding;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9448

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/18.568720

Filename

568720