Duality and Stability Regions of Multi-rate Broadcast and Multiple Access Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the stability regions of two-user fading Gaussian MAC and BC networks with fixed-rate coding, showing duality properties and differences under power constraints, which informs network design and scheduling.

Contribution

It characterizes the stability regions of MAC and BC networks with fixed-rate coding and demonstrates the extension of duality properties to stability regions under power constraints.

Findings

Duality extends to stability regions under average power constraints.

Union of MAC stability regions is contained within BC stability region under peak power constraints.

Explicit characterization of stability regions for fixed-rate, fading Gaussian networks.

Abstract

We characterize stability regions of two-user fading Gaussian multiple access (MAC) and broadcast (BC) networks with centralized scheduling. The data to be transmitted to the users is encoded into codewords of fixed length. The rates of the codewords used are restricted to a fixed set of finite cardinality. With successive decoding and interference cancellation at the receivers, we find the set of arrival rates that can be stabilized over the MAC and BC networks. In MAC and BC networks with average power constraints, we observe that the duality property that relates the MAC and BC information theoretic capacity regions extend to their stability regions as well. In MAC and BC networks with peak power constraints, the union of stability regions of dual MAC networks is found to be strictly contained in the BC stability region.