A Joint PRMA and Packet Scheduling MAC Protocol for Multimedia CDMA Cellular Networks

Abstract

We propose a new low-complexity MAC solution for multimedia CDMA cellular networks considering packet reservation and scheduling jointly. The proposed MAC, which we call joint PRMA and packet scheduling (JPPS), treats realtime traffic and non-real-time traffic separately. Once a real-time traffic flow (a continuous packet burst) is admitted to the system, its code channel(s) will be implicitly reserved until its last packet is transmitted, as in PRMA. Real-time traffic has delay priority over non-real-time, and we also prioritize within various nonreal-time traffic flows. Packet scheduling techniques are then used to schedule all the real-time and non-real-time packets.Furthermore, an optimal channel access scheme based on a simple linear program is proposed. Simulation results comparing the performance of JPPS versus the well-known MAC protocol WISPER demonstrate lower delay for real time traffic and lower overall packet loss ratio for JPPS.