Multiplexing Gains under Mixed-Delay Constraints on Wyner's Soft-Handoff Model

This paper analyzes the multiplexing gains (MG) achievable over Wyner's soft-handoff model under mixed-delay constraints, that is, when delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant data are simultaneously transmitted over the network. In the considered model, delay-sensitive data cannot participate or profit in any ways from transmitter or receiver cooperation, but delay-tolerant data can. Cooperation for delay-tolerant data takes place over rate-limited links and is limited to a fixed number of cooperation rounds. For the described setup, inner and outer bounds are derived on the set of MG pairs that are simultaneously achievable for delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant data. The bounds are tight in special cases and allow us to obtain the following conclusions. For large cooperation rates, and when both transmitters and receivers can cooperate, it is possible to simultaneously attain maximum MG for delay-sensitive messages and maximum sum MG for all messages. For comparison, in scheduling schemes (also called time-sharing schemes), the largest achievable sum MG decreases linearly with the MG of delay-sensitive messages. A similar linear decrease is proved for any coding scheme, not only for scheduling schemes, if only transmitters or only receivers can cooperate (but not both) and if delay-sensitive messages have moderate MG. In contrast, if the MG of delay-sensitive messages is small, the maximum sum MG can be achieved even with only transmitter or only receiver cooperation. To summarise, when cooperation rates are high and both transmitters and receivers can cooperate or when delay-sensitive messages have small MG, then transmitting delay-sensitive messages causes no penalty on the sum-MG. In other regimes, this penalty increases proportionally to the delay-tolerant MG in the sense that increasing the delay-sensitive MG by Δ penalises the largest achievable delay-tolerant MG by 2 Δ and thus the sum MG by Δ .