Layered black-box, behavioral interconnection perspective and applications to the problem of communication with fidelity criteria, Part I: i.i.d. sources

In this paper, the problem of communication over an essentially unknown channel, which is known to be able to communicate a source to a destination to within a certain distortion level, is considered from a behavioral, interconnection view-point. Rates of reliable communication are derived and source-channel separation for communication with fidelity criteria is proved. The results are then generalized to the multi-user setting under certain assumptions. Other applications of this problem problem which follow from this perspective are discussed.