Reliable transmission of two correlated sources over an asymmetric multiple-access channel (Corresp.)

Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the transmission of two arbitrarily correlated sources over a discrete memoryless asymmetric multiple-access channel. It is shown that in this situation the classical separation principle of Shannon (the factorization of the joint source-channel transmission problem into separate source and channel coding problems) applies. This asymmetric case is the first non-trivial situation of a multiple-access channel with arbitrarily correlated sources in which the sufficient conditions found for the reliable transmission of the sources over the channel turn out to be necessary as well. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that these necessary and sufficient conditions continue to hold if feedback is available to one or both of the encoders.