Approximate performance analysis of heavily loaded slotted downlink channel in a wireless CDMA system supporting integrated voice/data services

This paper is concerned with the performance analysis of a slotted downlink channel in a wireless code division multiple access (CDMA) communication system with integrated packet voice/data transmission. The system model consists of a base station (BS) and mobile terminals (MT), each of which is able to receive voice and/or data packets. Packets of accepted voice calls are transmitted immediately while accepted multipacket data messages are initially buffered in first in, first out (FIFO) queues created separately for each destination. The BS distinguishes between silence and talkspurt periods of voice sources, so that packets of accepted data messages can use their own codes for transmission during silent time slots. To fulfill QoS requirements for both traffic types, the number of simultaneous packet transmissions over the downlink channel must be limited. To perform this task, a fair, single-priority multiqueueing scheduling scheme is employed. Discrete-time Markov processes are used to model the system operation. Statistical dependence between queues is the main difficulty which arises during the analysis. This dependence leads to serious computational complexity. The aim of this paper is to present an approximate analytical method which enables one to evaluate system performance despite the dependence. Therefore, it is assumed that the system is heavily loaded with data traffic, and a heuristic assumption is made that makes the queueing analysis computationally tractable. Typical system performance measures (i.e., the data message blocking probability, the average data throughput and delay) are evaluated, however, due to the accepted heuristic assumption, the analysis is approximate and that is why computer simulation is used to validate it.