A MAC protocol with efficient fair scheduling for CDMA-based mobile networks

The challenge in designing MAC protocols for future mobile networks is two-fold: providing guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and efficient wireless resource utilization. While a class of algorithms called GPS succeeds in achieving the above goals in wired networks, it cannot be directly applied to mobile networks. The key difficulty is the distributed nature of the queues in the uplink, which results in significant messaging overhead in transmitting states of active streams to the centralized scheduler. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol based on the multi-code CDMA (MC-CDMA) mobile network. Packets transmission is fairly scheduled within the time scale of frame, avoiding frequent status reporting. Analysis and simulation results show that the performance of our MAC protocol with the fair scheduling is similar with ideal GPS in terms of providing guaranteed QoS and efficient utilization of wireless resource.