A New Unified Method for Fixed-Length Source Coding Problems of General Sources

Abstract

This paper establishes a new unified method for fixed-length source coding problems of general sources. Specifically, we introduce an alternative definition of the smooth Renyi entropy of order zero, and show a unified approach to present the fixed-length coding rate in terms of this information quantity. Our definition of the smooth Renyi entropy has a clear operational meaning, and hence is easy to calculate for finite block lengths. Further, we represent various e-source coding rate and the strong converse property for general sources in terms of the smooth Renyi entropy, and compare them with the results obtained by Han and Renner et al.