A handshake protocol for CDMA wireless LANs with error control capabilities

Observing the threshold effect of CDMA systems, this paper proposes a simple, fair protocol suitable for the CDMA environment, which does not need the additional feedback channel but can still achieve the goal of error control. Based on the same rationale as the CSMA/CD protocol, this protocol is designed to avoid collision or congestion of traffic before formal transmission of a packet. By the handshake procedure, the intended transmitter is able to test the channel quality and the receiver's status using a very short handshake packet. Therefore, channel traffic can be controlled to avoid overload. The throughput and reliability are analyzed based on the underlying Markovian models. Numerical results are compared to other error control schemes and show that with a reasonably short handshake time compared to the packet transmission time, this handshake protocol with simple forward error correction offers an excellent alternative for error control and can even improve the throughput performance.