On the sub-optimality of single-letter coding in multi-terminal communications

We investigate binary block-codes (BBC). A BBC is defined as a vector of Boolean functions. We consider BBCs which are generated randomly, and using single-letter distributions. We characterize the vector of dependency spectrums of these BBCs. We use this vector to upper-bound the correlation between the outputs of two distributed BBCs. Finally, the upper-bound is used to show that the large blocklength single-letter coding schemes in the literature are sub-optimal in some multiterminal communication settings.