Though distributed arithmetic coding (DAC) is an effective implementation of Slepian-Wolf coding, its performance, which is closely linked with its decoding complexity, has not received a thorough analysis. With binary sources with equally-likely symbols as the research object, this paper develops the DAC spectrum and makes use of it as a tool to answer the complexity problem of the ideal DAC decoder. Based on an in-depth analysis on DAC decoding process, we define the DAC spectrum and propose t
