Noiseless coding of correlated information sources

Correlated information sequences \cdots ,X_{-1},X_0,X_1, \cdots and \cdots,Y_{-1},Y_0,Y_1, \cdots are generated by repeated independent drawings of a pair of discrete random variables X, Y from a given bivariate distribution P_{XY} (x,y) . We determine the minimum number of bits per character R_X and R_Y needed to encode these sequences so that they can be faithfully reproduced under a variety of assumptions regarding the encoders and decoders. The results, some of which are not at all obvious, are presented as an admissible rate region \mathcal{R} in the R_X - R_Y plane. They generalize a similar and well-known result for a single information sequence, namely R_X \geq H (X) for faithful reproduction.