On the Sub-Optimality of Single-Letter Coding Over Networks

In this paper, we establish a new bound tying together the effective length and the maximum correlation between the outputs of an arbitrary pair of Boolean functions which operate on two sequences of correlated random variables. We derive a new upper bound on the correlation between the outputs of these functions. The upper bound may find applications in problems in many areas which deal with common information. We build upon Witsenhausen's result [1] on maximum correlation. The present upper bound takes into account the effective length of the Boolean functions in characterizing the correlation. We use the new bound to characterize the communication-cooperation tradeoff in multi-terminal communications. We investigate binary block-codes (BBC). A BBC is defined as a vector of Boolean functions. We consider an ensemble of BBCs which is randomly generated using single-letter distributions. We characterize the vector of dependency spectrums of these BBCs. We use this vector to bound the correlation between the outputs of two distributed BBCs. Finally, the upper bound is used to show that the large blocklength single-letter coding schemes studied in the literature are sub-optimal in various multi-terminal communication settings.