Rate-Constrained Simulation and Source Coding IID Sources

Necessary conditions for asymptotically optimal sliding-block or stationary codes for source coding and rate-constrained simulation of memoryless sources are presented and used to motivate a design technique for trellis-encoded source coding and rate-constrained simulation. The code structure has intuitive similarities to classic random coding arguments as well as to ``fake process'' methods and alphabet-constrained methods. Experimental evidence shows that the approach provides comparable or superior performance in comparison with previously published methods on common examples, sometimes by significant margins.