Channel Simulation and Coded Source Compression

Coded source compression, also known as source compression with helpers, has been a major variant of distributed source compression, but has hitherto received little attention in the quantum regime. This letter treats and solves the corresponding quantum coded source compression through an observation that connects coded source compression with channel simulation. First, we consider classical source coding with quantum side information, where the quantum side information is observed by a helper and sent to the decoder via a classical channel. We derive a single-letter characterization of the achievable rate region for this problem. The direct coding theorem of our result is proved via the measurement compression theory of Winter, a quantum-to-classical channel simulation. Our result reveals that a helper's scheme which separately conducts a measurement and a compression is suboptimal, and measurement compression seems necessary to achieve the optimal rate region. We then study coded source compression in the fully quantum regime, where two different scenarios are considered depending on the types of communication channels between the legitimate source and the receiver. We further allow entanglement assistance from the quantum helper in both scenarios. We characterize the involved quantum resources and derive single-letter expressions of the achievable rate region. The direct coding proofs are based on well-known quantum protocols, the quantum state merging protocol, and the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol, together with the quantum reverse Shannon theorem.