Rate-Delay Tradeoffs for Communicating a Bursty Source over an Erasure Channel with Feedback

We consider the protocol overhead of meeting an expected delay constraint in sending a bursty source over a binary erasure channel with feedback. In contrast to related work on stability and delay for medium-access control, we focus on physical layer aspects of the problem by jointly considering queuing and message encoding for transmission over the channel. Our model necessitates the lossy encoding of source idle times, and we investigate the amount of information implicitly communicated by their efficient encoding. We show that the stable throughput region for large, but finite, delay is the same as without this additional constraint; however, our results suggest that achieving the same average delay requires a significant increase in channel bandwidth. Outer bounds on the achievable rate-delay region are also developed.