Diversity Enabled Wireless Transmissions with Random Arrivals and Hard Delay Constraints

Hard delay-constrained wireless communication has attracted considerable attention recently, as it is expected to play an essential role in time-sensitive networks (TSN) and deterministic networks (DetNet), However, it has been a long challenge to develop techniques that satisfy the constraints on both bounded delay and average power. In this paper, we investigate the tradeoff between delay and throughput in a delay-bounded wireless system with random arrivals, which characterizes the fundamental performance limitations of delay-bounded communication over fading channels. In particular, for diversity-enabled wireless systems with the finite average power, we present the sufficient condition of the arrival process with which the hard delay constraint can be satisfied. Moreover, based on the proposed sufficient condition, a cross-layer policy is conceived to achieve the bounded delay. Through markovian queueing analysis, the average power consumption of this policy is derived as a function of latency threshold and throughput. By this means, the latency-throughput tradeoff is characterized given the average power.