Reliability and efficiency of flexibly decodable distributed coding strategies

Distributed lossless coding of correlated sources offers the potential for sizable reductions in coding rates in comparison to independent coding. However, it is more sensitive to encoder failures as the loss of one encoder may cause the decoding of many sources to fail. Strategies for increasing the reliability of lossless distributed coding were first considered by Marco and Neuhoff. This paper introduces and analyzes several new strategies based on flexible decoding, in contrast to the rigid decoding strategies considered previously. The new flexible schemes are found to offer significant gains over the prior rigid schemes.