Bits Through Queues With Feedback

In their seminal 1996 paper, Anantharam and Verdú showed that feedback does not increase the capacity of a queue under First-in-First-Out service policy and exponentially distributed service time. Since the channel has memory, this negative result raises the question whether it extends to other non-trivial combinations of service policy and service time. This paper addresses this question by providing two sufficient conditions under which feedback either increases capacity or does not increase capacity. The first is a sufficient condition on the service time distribution for feedback to increase capacity under First-In-First-Out service policy. The second is a sufficient condition for feedback not to increase capacity and is general in that it depends on the output distribution of the queue, but explicitly depends neither on the queue policy nor on the service time distribution. This condition is satisfied, for instance, by queues with Last-Come-First-Serve service policy and bounded service times.