Providing Differentiated Services in Multiaccess Systems With and Without Queue State Information

In this paper, we consider one quality-of-service (QoS) criterion, average packet delay (queueing delay plus service time), in a multiaccess system and investigate the basic problem whether a multiaccess system can meet the different average packet delay requirements of all users by combining information theory with queueing theory. Two different cases of the central scheduler with and without queue state information (QSI) are discussed. If the QSI is not available to the central scheduler, we show that static rate allocation policies (SRAPs) can achieve better average packet delay performance than probabilistic rate allocation policies. Based on this conclusion, the delay feasibility checking process reduces to checking whether the required service rate vector lies in the multiaccess capacity region. We find that for users with equal transmit power, only N inequalities are necessary for the checking process, whereas for users with unequal transmit powers, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm for such a decision. Furthermore, if the system cannot satisfy the average packet delay requirements of all users, we prove that as long as the sum power is larger than a threshold, there is always an approach to adjust the transmit powers of different users to satisfy the average packet delay requirements. On the other hand, if the QSI is available to the central scheduler, we propose two dynamic scheduling algorithms to achieve proportional average packet delay and compare their performances with optimal SRAP by simulations.