On The Significance Of Binning In A Scaling-law Sense

An efficient distributed source coding system with two encoders and dependent data streams must remove two kinds of redundancy: redundancy in each stream and between the two streams. The striking result of Slepian and Wolf showed that the latter can be eliminated even if each encoder only observes one of the source streams. The coding technique that permits to achieve this is often referred to as "binning." In large source networks, binning can result in considerable savings in terms of encoding rate. The focus of this paper is on the scaling-law behavior, i.e., the characteristic performance in the limit as the source network size tends to infinity. For paradigmatic network topologies, we analyze the rate savings through binning, and we show that in some cases of interest, binning is scaling-law irrelevant.