On the Vacationing CEO Problem: Achievable Rates and Outer Bounds

TL;DR

This paper investigates a combined source coding problem merging the CEO and multiple description problems, providing achievable rates and outer bounds, and demonstrating sum rate optimality under certain distortion constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a new combined problem setting, derives achievable regions and outer bounds, and proves sum rate optimality for specific distortion scenarios.

Findings

Achievable rate region derived for the combined problem.

Outer bounds established matching the achievable region in some cases.

Sum rate optimality demonstrated for certain distortion constraints.

Abstract

This paper studies a class of source coding problems that combines elements of the CEO problem with the multiple description problem. In this setting, noisy versions of one remote source are observed by two nodes with encoders (which is similar to the CEO problem). However, it differs from the CEO problem in that each node must generate multiple descriptions of the source. This problem is of interest in multiple scenarios in efficient communication over networks. In this paper, an achievable region and an outer bound are presented for this problem, which is shown to be sum rate optimal for a class of distortion constraints.