Integrated power control for circuit & packet switched traffic in wireless networks

We investigate a set of novel distributed channel access schemes for wireless networks supporting both circuit-switched and packet-switched traffic. The dissimilar nature of each traffic type calls for differentiated treatment by the network: circuit-switched or streamed traffic requires constant rate bit flows across the wireless links, hence the network shall maintain the effective traffic rate of operational/active links at all times (link protection)., packet-switched or elastic traffic is intermittent and delay-tolerant. Hence, it is more efficient to buffer the incoming packets, and transmit them when appropriate, rather than reserving wireless resources for each individual flow. Past research in power-control looked at the problem of supporting each traffic type in isolated, separate networks, and has come up with the distributed algorithms of DPC/ALP (N. Bambos et al., 2000) and PCMA (N. Bambos et al., 2002) [S. Kandukuri et al., 2001], respectively. In this work, we propose a framework which integrates these two algorithms into a single set of access schemes to allow the sharing of the wireless resources to both traffic types and to new hybrid schemes.