Successive Coding Strategy in the m-helper Problem

We evaluate the performance of the successive coding strategy for the problem of multiterminal lossy coding of correlated Gaussian sources. We consider the m-helper problem for the special case of m = 1 where one source provides partial side information to the decoder to help reconstruction of the main source signal. Our results reconfirm the fact that the successive coding strategy is an optimal strategy in sense of achieving the rate-distortion function of the 1-helper problem. Comparing the performance of the sequential coding with the performance of the successive coding, we show that there is no sum rate loss when the side information is not available at the encoder. Finally, based on the successive coding strategy, we provide an achievable rate-distortion region for the m-helper problem