Abstract
Zero-error single-channel source coding has been studied extensively over the past decades. Its natural multi-channel generalization is however seldom investigated. While the special case with multiple symmetric-alphabet channels was studied a decade ago, codes in such setting have no advantage over single-channel codes in data compression, making them worthless in most applications. With essentially no development since the last decade, in this paper, we break the stalemate by showing that it is possible to beat single-channel source codes in terms of compression assuming asymmetric-alphabet channels. We present the multi-channel analogs of several classical results in single-channel source coding, e.g., a multi-channel Huffman code is an optimal tree-decodable code. We also show evidences that finding an efficient construction of multi-channel Huffman codes may be hard. Nevertheless, we propose a construction whose redundancy is guaranteed to be no larger than that of an optimal single-channel source code.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2021 - Proceedings |
| Publisher | IEEE |
| Pages | 2024-2029 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-5386-8209-8 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 12 Jul 2021 |
| MoE publication type | A4 Conference publication |
| Event | IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Virtual, online, Melbourne, Australia Duration: 12 Jul 2021 → 20 Jul 2021 https://2021.ieee-isit.org/ |
Conference
| Conference | IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory |
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| Abbreviated title | ISIT |
| Country/Territory | Australia |
| City | Melbourne |
| Period | 12/07/2021 → 20/07/2021 |
| Internet address |