On Transmitting Correlated Sources over a MAC

The joint source channel coding problem of transmitting a pair of correlated sources over a 2−user MAC is considered. A new concatenated coding scheme, comprising of an inner code of fixed block-length and an outer code of arbitrarily large block-length, is proposed. Its information theoretic performance is analyzed to derive a new set of sufficient conditions. An example is identified to demonstrate that the proposed coding technique can strictly outperform the current known best, which is due to Cover El Gamal and Salehi [1]. Our findings are based on Dueck’s ingenious coding technique proposed for the particular example studied in [2].