A joint PRMA and packet scheduling MAC protocol for multimedia CDMA cellular networks

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 real-time 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 non-real-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