A Source-Channel Separation Theorem with Application to the Source Broadcast Problem

Abstract: A converse method is developed for the source broadcast problem. Specifically, it is shown that the separation architecture is optimal for a variant of the source broadcast problem and the associated source-channel separation theorem can be leveraged, via a reduction argument, to establish a necessary condition for the original problem, which unifies several existing results in the literature. Somewhat surprisingly, this method, albeit based on the source-channel separation theorem, can be used to prove the optimality of non-separation based schemes and determine the performance limits in certain scenarios where the separation architecture is suboptimal.