Approaching the Slepian–Wolf boundary using practical channel codes

We review the interpretation of the Slepian–Wolf result for compression of correlated sources as a problem of channel coding with side information. Based on this review, we propose a method that allows the use of practical error correcting codes of fixed length to achieve performance close to any point in the Slepian–Wolf boundary without the use of explicit time-sharing arguments. The performance of the proposed approach when turbo codes are utilized is shown by simulations.