Medium access control for advanced cellular Internet services

Advanced cellular Internet services (ACIS) are targeted for applications such as web browsing with a peak downlink rate on the order of 1-2 Mb/s using the wide-area cellular infrastructure. PCS or new spectrum allocations by the FCC could be used for ACIS. In order to provide bandwidth on demand using scarce spectrum, the medium access control (MAC) protocol must: (1) handle dynamic and diverse traffic with high throughput and (2) efficiently reuse limited spectrum with high peak rates and good quality. Most of the existing approaches do not address the second aspect. In this paper, we first outline the problems for media access for ACIS and review some existing approaches, followed by a discussion of the proposed methodology. The remaining part focuses on a channel assignment method which combines the concepts of interference sensing and priority ordering to dynamically reuse spectrum with low interference probability. Preliminary simulation results based on a packetized voice model indicate that this method is able to reuse spectrum efficiently in a large cellular system having many users with short active periods.