Power-delay trade-off in multi-link, single channel wireless access

Given a set of communication links sharing a channel, delay for delivery of a given amount of data backlogged in link transmitters can be traded off against average power consumption, for a fixed transmission QoS requirement. The main result of this work is the identification of an asymptotically sharp lower bound for the average power needed to carry a given backlog within a delay constraint. The power-delay trade-off allows to compare a non orthogonal CDMA capacity sharing with an orthogonal TDMA. Numerical examples for a collection of links belonging to an ad-hoc network are discussed. © 2006 IEEE