Distributed Source Coding Using Raptor Codes for Hidden Markov Sources

Interest in distributed source coding (DSC) has increased in recent years due to the development of wireless networks. In this paper we propose a solution based on a new rateless class of codes, the Raptor codes. In real applications (where the data source length and the correlation between the sources may vary), rateless codes can be naturally adapted by generating just a single codeword with suitable length. Raptor codes were already considered by Caire et al. (2005) for the lossless compression of a single source.