A Lower Bound for Variable Rate Slepian-Wolf Coding

In this paper we analyze the redundancy of variable rate Slepian-Wolf coding. For any memoryless source-side information pair (X, Y) = {(X_i,Y_i)}Einfin_i=1 with finite alphabet, the redundancy R_n(epsi_n) of variable rate Slepian-Wolf coding is defined as the minimum of the difference between the compression rate of any variable-rate Slepian-Wolf code resulting from coding XEn₁ with decoding error probability epsi_n, and the conditional entropy H(X|Y). It is proved that under mild assumptions, for sufficiently large n, R_n (epsi_n) is lower bounded by dradiclog n/n, where d > 0 is a constant