Prerequisites & Notation

Before You Begin

This chapter brings together source coding and channel coding in multi-terminal settings. We assume the reader is comfortable with the following topics.

Slepian–Wolf distributed lossless source coding(Review ch07)
Self-check: Can you state the Slepian–Wolf rate region and explain the role of binning in achievability?
Wyner–Ziv lossy source coding with side information(Review ch08)
Self-check: Can you write the Wyner–Ziv rate-distortion function and explain how it differs from the conditional rate-distortion function?
Lossless and lossy source coding fundamentals(Review ch05)
Self-check: Can you state Shannon's source coding theorem and the rate-distortion function?
Channel capacity for DMCs and the channel coding theorem(Review ch09)
Self-check: Can you state the channel coding theorem and sketch both the achievability and converse proofs?
The multiple access channel capacity region(Review ch14)
Self-check: Can you write the MAC capacity region and explain successive cancellation decoding?
The degraded broadcast channel capacity region(Review ch15)
Self-check: Can you state the superposition coding achievable region for the degraded BC?

Notation for This Chapter

Symbols introduced or heavily used in this chapter. See also the global notation table.

Symbol	Meaning	Introduced
$S_1, S_2$	Correlated source random variables	s01
$X_1, X_2$	Channel inputs from encoders 1 and 2	s01
$Y$	Channel output	s01
$H(S_1 \| S_2)$	Conditional entropy of $S_1$ given $S_2$	s01
$I(S_1; S_2)$	Mutual information between sources	s01
$C_{\text{MAC}}$	Capacity region of the multiple access channel	s01
$C_{\text{BC}}$	Capacity region of the broadcast channel	s02
$d(s, \hat{s})$	Per-letter distortion measure	s02
$D$	Distortion constraint	s02
$\kappa$	Source–channel bandwidth ratio (channel uses per source symbol)	s03

← Ch 18 Source Coding for the Multiple Access Channel