Symmetric Distributed Arithmetic Coding of Correlated Sources

We propose a new scheme for symmetric Slepian-Wolf coding of correlated binary sources. Unlike previous designs that employ capacity-achieving channel codes, the proposed scheme is based on arithmetic codes with error correction capability. We define a time-sharing version of a distributed arithmetic coder, and a soft joint decoder. Experimental results on two sources show that, for short block length, the proposed scheme outperforms the symmetric turbo code design in (Stankovic et al., 2006).