—This paper deals with the analytical evaluation of the average delay, the packet-loss rate (PLR) and the throughput of a multi-user (MU) wireless system that capitalizes on a crosslayer design of adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) with automatic repeat request (ARQ). To this end, we propose a heuristic scheduling policy, which has the nice properties to effectively exploit the system resources and to be analytically tractable. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheduler. Moreover, the excellent match between analytical and simulated performance allows the proposed approach to be used for cross-layer design optimization, avoiding time-consuming simulations. Keywords—Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC); automatic repeat request (ARQ); cross-layer design; scheduling.