Efficient allocation of radio resources for CDMA based wireless packet data systems

With the strong growth of the Internet, paralleled with the growth of mobile telephony, provision of multimedia capabilities to mobile communications becomes equivalent to the provision of fast Internet access to mobile users. Thus, third generation (3G) systems need to support high bit rates and packet data/IP access. 3G systems that provide high quality voice services as well as high speed packet data need a mechanism to share radio and network resources efficiently amongst prospective clients by utilizing the characteristics of the heterogeneous traffic. This paper is concerned with developing a "burst switching" technique as an efficient radio resource allocation scheme for a CDMA based 3G system that provides high speed packet data services. Conventional circuit and packet switching techniques become inefficient in providing wireless packet data services through CDMA due to poor resource utilization, and poor quality of service (QoS) characteristics, respectively. The proposed burst switching technique aims to overcome these problems by allocating radio resources to users for the duration of data bursts rather than an entire session or a single packet as in the case of circuit and packet switching, respectively, and releasing them at the end of the bursts for potential use by other clients. The ideal burst switching system would immediately release the physical layer resources at the beginning of the idle period following a packet burst. Its practical counterpart would make use of two timers that are used to release the physical and upper layer resources, respectively. This paper provides insights as to how these timer values should be selected to provide low delay packet service while maintaining efficient resource allocation to users.