Multiuser Successive Refinement and Multiple Description Coding

We consider the multiuser successive refinement (MSR) problem, where the users are connected to a central server via links with different noiseless capacities, and each user wishes to reconstruct in a successive-refinement fashion. An achievable region is given for the twouser two-layer case and it provides the complete rate-distortion region for the Gaussian source under the MSE distortion measure. The key observation is that this problem includes the multiple description (MD) problem (with two descriptions) as a subsystem, and the techniques useful in the MD problem can be extended to this case. It is shown that the coding scheme based on the universality of random binning is sub-optimal, because multiple Gaussian side informations only at the decoders do incur performance loss, in contrast to the case of single side information at the decoder. It is further shown that unlike the single user case, when there are multiple users, the loss of performance by a multistage coding approach ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TIT
• Authors: Chao Tian, Jun Chen, Suhas N. Diggavi
• Keywords: Gaussian Source, Multiuser Successive Refinement, Successive Refinement, TIT 2008