Optimal Rate-Reliability-Delay Tradeoff in Networks with Composite Links

Networks need to accommodate diverse applications with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. New ideas at the physical layer are being developed for this purpose, such as diversity embedded coding, which is a technique that combines high rates with high reliability. We address the problem of how to fully utilize different rate-reliability characteristics at the physical layer to support different types of traffic over a network and to jointly maximize their utilities.