n-channel symmetric multiple descriptions: new rate regions

A new achievable region for the symmetric n-channel multiple descriptions (MD) problem (n>2) is presented. This is derived from our recent result for the problem of information theoretic characterization of maximum distance separable erasure codes in a source-channel coding framework. The rate region presented here is a generalization of the ElGamal and Cover region for the case of n=2 descriptions and achieves points that have not been known in the literature previously.