Operational information content sum capacity: Formulation and examples

This paper considers Quality-of-Information (QoI) aware rate allocation policies for multiple access channels. QoI is a recently introduced composite metric which is impacted by a number of attributes including accuracy and timeliness of delivery of information communicated from the source(s) to the destination(s), and as such differs from traditional quality-of-service metrics considered to date. The focus of this work is defining the Operational Information Content Sum Capacity (OICC-S) of a network, achieved by the set of QoI-vectors supported which maximize sum utility of the system. This utility is defined as a function of the QoI attributes provided by the source input, as well as the channel induced attributes that impact the QoI delivered to the destination(s). Optimum rate allocation to maximize the output sum utility and achieve OICC-S of the network for various settings is provided, and demonstrated to differ from the solution that provides maximum throughput.