Delay minimization with a general pentagon rate region

We consider a communication channel with two transmitters and one receiver, with an underlying rate region which is approximated as a general pentagon. Different from the Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) capacity region, the sum-rate on the dominant face of this pentagon is not a constant. We allocate rates from this rate region to users according to their current queue lengths in order to minimize the average delay in the system. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision problem (MDP), and derive the structural properties of the corresponding discounted-cost MDP. We show that the delay-optimal policy has a switch curve structure. For the discounted-cost problem, we prove that the switch curve has a limit along one of the dimensions.