Successive Refinement with Decoder Cooperation and its Channel Coding Duals

TL;DR

This paper explores cooperative successive refinement in multi-terminal source coding with decoder cribbing, introducing a new coding scheme and extending insights to dual channel coding scenarios involving multiple access channels.

Contribution

It characterizes fundamental limits for cooperative source coding with various cribbing types and introduces a novel coding scheme, also applying these ideas to dual channel coding problems.

Findings

Characterized limits for non-causal, strictly-causal, and causal cribbing.

Developed a new Forward Encoding and Block Markov Decoding scheme.

Extended results to multiple access channels with cribbing.

Abstract

We study cooperation in multi terminal source coding models involving successive refinement. Specifically, we study the case of a single encoder and two decoders, where the encoder provides a common description to both the decoders and a private description to only one of the decoders. The decoders cooperate via cribbing, i.e., the decoder with access only to the common description is allowed to observe, in addition, a deterministic function of the reconstruction symbols produced by the other. We characterize the fundamental performance limits in the respective settings of non-causal, strictly-causal and causal cribbing. We use a new coding scheme, referred to as Forward Encoding and Block Markov Decoding, which is a variant of one recently used by Cuff and Zhao for coordination via implicit communication. Finally, we use the insight gained to introduce and solve some dual channel coding scenarios involving Multiple Access Channels with cribbing.