QoS-oriented packet scheduling for wireless multimedia CDMA communications

In the third-generation (and beyond) wireless communication systems, there will be a mixture of different traffic classes, each having its own transmission rate characteristics and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, a QoS-oriented medium access control (MAC) protocol with fair packet loss sharing (FPLS) scheduling is proposed for wireless code-division multiple access (CDMA) communications. The QoS parameters under consideration are the transmission bit error rate (BER), packet loss, and delay requirements. The MAC protocol exploits both time-division and code-division statistical multiplexing. The BER requirements are guaranteed by properly arranging simultaneous packet transmissions and controlling there transmit power levels, whereas the packet loss and delay requirements are guaranteed by proper packet scheduling. The basic idea of FPLS is to schedule the transmission of multimedia packets in such a way that all the users have a fair share of packet loss according to their QoS requirements, which maximizes the number of the served users under the QoS constraints. Simulation results demonstrate effectiveness of the FPLS scheduler, in comparison with other previously proposed scheduling algorithms.