2010 Volume E93.A Issue 11 Pages 1868-1877
This paper establishes a new unified method for fixed-length source coding problems of general sources. Specifically, we introduce an alternative definition of the smooth Rényi entropy of order zero, and show a unified approach to present the fixed-length coding rate in terms of this information quantity. Our definition of the smooth Rényi entropy has a clear operational meaning, and hence is easy to calculate for finite block lengths. Further, we represent various ε-source coding rate and the strong converse property for general sources in terms of the smooth Rényi entropy, and compare them with the results obtained by Han and Renner et al.