Cascade, Triangular and Two Way Source Coding with degraded side information at the second user

TL;DR

This paper characterizes the rate-distortion regions for cascade and triangular source coding problems with degraded side information, including extensions to two-way settings and quadratic Gaussian cases, advancing understanding of efficient coding with side information.

Contribution

The paper provides explicit rate-distortion characterizations for cascade and triangular source coding with degraded side information, including two-way and quadratic Gaussian extensions.

Findings

Optimal decoding and re-binning strategy at User 1.

Complete explicit solutions for quadratic Gaussian cases.

Extended models with helper and two-way communication.

Abstract

We consider the Cascade and Triangular rate-distortion problems where the same side information is available at the source node and User 1, and the side information available at User 2 is a degraded version of the side information at the source node and User 1. We characterize the rate-distortion region for these problems. For the Cascade setup, we showed that, at User 1, decoding and re-binning the codeword sent by the source node for User 2 is optimum. We then extend our results to the Two way Cascade and Triangular setting, where the source node is interested in lossy reconstruction of the side information at User 2 via a rate limited link from User 2 to the source node. We characterize the rate distortion regions for these settings. Complete explicit characterizations for all settings are also given in the Quadratic Gaussian case. We conclude with two further extensions: A triangular source coding problem with a helper, and an extension of our Two Way Cascade setting in the Quadratic Gaussian case.