An inter-layer view of multiaccess communications

The literature on multiaccess communications has traditionally treated "network-layer" issues such as source burstiness, network delay, and buffer overflow, apart from "physical layer" issues such as channel modeling, coding, and detection. The recent work of Telatar and Callager (1995) sought to bridge this unfortunate division. We extend this line of inquiry by examining a multiaccess communication scenario where users' packets arrive randomly into separate queues and transmission rates are allocated from the information-theoretic multiaccess capacity region based on the respective users queue states. In the symmetric case, a longer-queue-higher-rate allocation strategy is shown to minimize the average system delay of packets. Such a policy can be interpreted in the coding context as adaptive successive decoding.