Cooperative MAC Scheduling in CDMA-MANETs with Multiuser Detection

Code division multiple access mobile ad hoc networks (CDMA-MANETs) will be a next-generation wireless networking architecture to connect various military platforms. The classic contentionbased MAC protocols are inappropriate for tactical ad hoc networks, where more rigid requirements for the quality of service (QoS) (e.g., guaranteed packet delivery) have to be satisfied. In this paper, we propose a contention-free medium access control (MAC) scheduling framework for CDMA-MANETs where each mobile unit is capable of multiuser detection (MUD) as well. In this MAC scheduling scheme, how and when a pending data packet is going to be transmitted are cooperatively determined by the respective transmitter-receiver pair. Furthermore, to fully utilize the functionality provided by multiuser detection, our proposed cooperative MAC scheduling scheme is able to schedule multiple transmitters to simultaneously transmit packets to a same receiver. Computer simulations are carried out to demonstrate the performance of the proposed cooperative MAC scheduling framework. It is confirmed from simulation results that the packet average delay increases with either the packet generation rate or the network size. More importantly, the proposed cooperative MAC scheduling framework is more suitable for MUD-enabled CDMA-MANETs with heavier network traffic and possibly a larger number of network nodes.