A MAC Protocol for Multimedia Traffic in Slotted CDMA Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

In this paper, a media access control (MAC) protocol is proposed for multimedia traffic in slotted CDMA wireless communication systems. The channel resource is partitioned into four compartments: video, voice and data compartments, and common resource pool (CRP) which can be used by either voice or data. Video is only permitted to use its pre-allocated channels. Besides assigning voice to its own compartment, a threshold type decision policy is introduced to regulate voice call admission control in CRP. Data can use not only data and CRP compartments, but also the idle capacity of both video and voice. The proposed protocol provides a simple and flexible resource allocation decision for the multimedia traffic such that the bandwidth can be utilized efficiently while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirement for each traffic category. Two mathematical analysis methods are applied to evaluate the system performance. The first, Traditional Markov Analysis (TMA) is used to calculate the video and the voice blocking probabilities, and the second, Transient Fluid Analysis (TFA) is adopted to evaluate the average data delay and the channel utilization. Computer simulations verify the accuracy of mathematical models.