  The problem of side-information scalable (SI-scalable) source coding is
considered in this work, where the encoder constructs a progressive
description, such that the receiver with high quality side information will be
able to truncate the bitstream and reconstruct in the rate distortion sense,
while the receiver with low quality side information will have to receive
further data in order to decode. We provide inner and outer bounds for general
discrete memoryless sources. The achievable region is shown to be tight for the
case that either of the decoders requires a lossless reconstruction, as well as
the case with degraded deterministic distortion measures. Furthermore we show
that the gap between the achievable region and the outer bounds can be bounded
by a constant when square error distortion measure is used. The notion of
perfectly scalable coding is introduced as both the stages operate on the
Wyner-Ziv bound, and necessary and sufficient conditions are given for sources
satisfying a mild support condition. Using SI-scalable coding and successive
refinement Wyner-Ziv coding as basic building blocks, a complete
characterization is provided for the important quadratic Gaussian source with
multiple jointly Gaussian side-informations, where the side information quality
does not have to be monotonic along the scalable coding order. Partial result
is provided for the doubly symmetric binary source with Hamming distortion when
the worse side information is a constant, for which one of the outer bound is
strictly tighter than the other one.
