Scheduling Algorithms for Packet-Oriented MAC Protocols in Wireless Multimedia Systems

Future generation wireless multimedia communications will require efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols able to guarantee suitable Quality of Service (QoS) levels for different traffic classes while achieving a high utilization of radio resources. This paper proposes a new scheduling technique to be adopted at the MAC level in wireless access systems, named Dynamic Scheduling-Time Division Duplexing (DS-TDD), that efficiently manages video, voice, Web and background traffics. A theoretical approach is proposed in this paper to evaluate the DS-TDD performance with voice and Web traffics. Simulation results have permitted to highlight the following promising characteristics of the DS-TDD scheme: (i) a high capacity of real-time traffics is attained with a QoS insensitive to Web and background traffic loads; (ii) a high throughput can be guaranteed while preserving the QoS levels of the different traffic classes; (iii) heavier downlink traffic loads do not modify the QoS of uplink traffics. Finally, extensive comparisons with different scheduling schemes proposed in the literature have permitted to highlight the better performance of DS-TDD.