A Relay-Assisted Distributed Source Coding Problem

A relay-assisted distributed source coding problem with three statistically correlated sources is formulated and studied. Natural lower bounds for the rates are presented. The lower bounds are shown to be achievable for three special classes of joint source distributions. The achievable coding strategies for the three special classes are observed to have markedly different characteristics. A special class for which the lower bounds are not achievable is presented. A single unified coding strategy which subsumes all four special classes is derived.