This paper investigates the capacity of a channel in which information is
conveyed by the timing of consecutive packets passing through a queue with
independent and identically distributed service times. Such timing channels are
commonly studied under the assumption of a work-conserving queue. In contrast,
this paper studies the case of a bufferless queue that drops arriving packets
while a packet is in service. Under this bufferless model, the paper provides
upper bounds on the capacity of timing channels and establishes achievable
rates for the case of bufferless M/M/1 and M/G/1 queues. In particular, it is
shown that a bufferless M/M/1 queue at worst suffers less than 10% reduction in
capacity when compared to an M/M/1 work-conserving queue.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, accepted in 51st Annual Allerton Conference on
Communication, Control, and Computing, University of Illinois, Monticello,
Illinois, Oct 2-4, 201
