Distributed source coding using Abelian group codes: Extracting performance from structure

In this work, we consider a distributed source coding problem with a joint distortion criterion depending on the sources and the reconstruction. This includes as a special case the problem of computing a function of the sources to within some distortion and also the classic Slepian-Wolf problem [12], Berger-Tung problem [5], Wyner-Ziv problem [4], Yeung-Berger problem [6] and the Ahlswede-Korner-Wyner problem [3], [13]. While the prevalent trend in information theory has been to prove achievability results using Shannon's random coding arguments, using structured random codes offer rate gains over unstructured random codes for many problems. Motivated by this, we present a new achievable ratedistortion region (an inner bound to the performance limit) for this problem for discrete memoryless sources based on ldquogoodrdquo structured random nested codes built over abelian groups. We demonstrate rate gains for this problem over traditional coding schemes using random unstructured codes. For certain sources and distortion functions, the new rate region is strictly bigger than the Berger-Tung rate region, which has been the best known achievable rate region for this problem till now. Further, there is no known unstructured random coding scheme that achieves these rate gains. Achievable performance limits for single-user source coding using abelian group codes are also obtained as parts of the proof of the main coding theorem. As a corollary, we also prove that nested linear codes achieve the Shannon rate-distortion bound in the single-user setting. Note that while group codes retain some structure, they are more general than linear codes which can only be built over finite fields which are known to exist only for certain sizes.