Ozarow- Type Outer Bounds for Memoryless Sources and Channels

Two problems, namely multiple-description source coding and joint source-channel broadcasting of a common source, are addressed. For the multiple-description problem, we revisit Ozarow's technique for establishing impossibility results, and extend it to general sources and distortion measures. For the problem of sending a source over a broadcast channel, we revisit the bounding technique of Reznik, Feder and Zamir, and extend it to general sources, distortion measures and broadcast channels. Although the obtained bounds do not improve over existing results in the literature, they are relatively easy to evaluate, and their derivation reveals the similarities between the two bounding techniques.