Multiple description coding with many channels

An achievable region for the -channel multiple description coding problem is presented. This region generalizes twochannel results of El Gamal and Cover and of Zhang and Berger. It further generalizes three-channel results of Gray and Wyner and of Zhang and Berger. A source that is successively refinable on chains is shown to be successively refinable on trees. A new outer bound on the rate-distortion (RD) region for memoryless Gaussian sources with mean squared error distortion is also derived. The achievable region meets this outer bound for certain symmetric cases.