Throughput and delay analysis of a novel slotted CDMA MAC protocol for multimedia communication in wireless LANs

Much of the current work on medium-access-control (MAC) for wireless, multimedia communications focuses on statistically multiplexing traffic over a single high-speed channel, e.g. the dynamic-slot-assignment (DSA) protocol. However, fundamental queuing theory suggests that a MAC strategy which statistically multiplexes traffic over multiple parallel channels will offer smaller channel-access delays. Therefore, we present a novel slotted CDMA-based MAC protocol for the support of real-time, delay-sensitive multimedia traffic in wireless LANs. The channel-access delay performance and throughput performance of the proposed protocol are investigated, and the results show that the proposed protocol offers both a superior channel-access delay performance to that offered by DSA and a considerable throughput advantage when compared with ALOHA DS/SSMA ('random access' CDMA). A fair method for normalising throughput and delay of CDMA-based MAC protocols when compared with other dissimilar schemes is also presented.