For a Bernoulli source, independence makes entropy additive, so
Its information rate is therefore . If is an optimal prefix code and is its expected codeword length, the Shannon noiseless coding theorem gives
Consequently the information rate is at most the expected word length of the optimal code.
The source is reliably encodable at rate if, for each block length , there are an encoder with at most outputs and a decoder such that the block error probability
tends to zero as .
Its information rate is the limiting information entropy per source symbol,
when this limit exists.