On the Transmission of Bursty Sources

Traditionally, the bursty nature of data sources is not taken in consideration by information theory. Random arrival times typically are assumed to be smoothed out by appropriate source coding, rendering any meaningful analysis of the end-to-end delay impossible. On the other hand, network theory directly treats these issues, but over-simplifies the channel model. Particularly, the issues of noise and interference are ignored and no sophisticated coding is allowed. In this paper, we introduce a framework in which some aspects of both sides are incorporated. This results in the formulation of new scheduling problems. In simple settings, we are able to characterize and analyze delay optimal policies.