Source coding with conditionally less noisy side information

Abstract

We consider a lossless multi-terminal source coding problem with one transmitter, two receivers and side information. The achievable rate region of the problem is not well understood. In this paper, we characterise the rate region when the side information at one receiver is conditionally less noisy than the side information at the other, given this other receiver's desired source. The conditionally less noisy definition includes degraded side information and a common message as special cases, and it is motivated by the concept of less noisy broadcast channels. The key contribution of the paper is a new converse theorem employing a telescoping identity and the Csiszár sum identity.