Unified Structural View of Multiterminal Source Coding

113 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.In fact, we set distributed source coding problems in a general framework and take a unified structural view of not only the above open problems but any two-terminal problem with noncooperative encoding. The distortion criteria, if applicable, are required to apply to single letters and be bounded. The key to the above unification is held by a fundamental source coding principle which dissociates the underlying source coding mechanism from the applicable distortion criteria and extends the typicality arguments of Shannon and Wyner-Ziv. We generalize our theory further to show that distortion criteria can also be dissociated from the underlying coding mechanism in an arbitrary multiterminal setup. As in the two-terminal problem, the general achievable region permits an infinite order information-theoretic description. Moreover, we validate our analysis by rederiving known coding theorems using our technique: Our infinite order descriptions are shown to simplify to the expected first order in the known cases.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD