B3.14
Part II, 2001
A file of is to be transmitted over a communications link. At each time the sender can choose a transmission rate, , within the range Mb per second. The charge for transmitting at rate at time is . The function is fully known at time 0. If it takes a total time to transmit the file then there is a delay cost of , . Thus and are to be chosen to minimize
where and . Quoting and applying appropriate results of Pontryagin's maximum principle show that a property of the optimal policy is that there exists such that if and if .
Show that the optimal and are related by .
Suppose and . For what value of is it optimal to transmit at a constant rate 1 between times and ?