Multilevel distributed source coding

Inspired by mobile satellite communication systems, we consider a source coding system which consists of multiple sources, multiple encoders, and multiple decoders. Each encoder has access to a certain subset of the sources, each decoder has access to a certain subset of the encoders, and each decoder reconstructs a certain subset of the sources almost perfectly. The connectivity between the sources and the encoders, the connectivity between the encoders and the decoders, and the reconstruction requirements for the decoders are all arbitrary. We obtain inner and outer bounds of the coding rate region in terms of /spl Gamma/* and /spl Gamma/*, respectively, which are fundamental regions in the entropy space defined by Yeung.