Cross-Layer Design and Analysis of Downlink Communications in Cellular CDMA Systems

A cellular CDMA network with voice and data communications is considered. Focusing on the downlink direction, we seek for the overall performance improvement which can be achieved by cross-layer analysis and design, taking physical layer, link layer, network layer, and transport layer into account. We are concerned with the role of each single layer as well as the interaction among layers, and propose algorithms/schemes accordingly to improve the system performance. These proposals include adaptive scheduling for link layer, priority-based handoff strategy for network admission control, and an algorithm for the avoidance of TCP spurious timeouts at the transport layer. Numerical results show the performance gain of each proposed scheme over independent performance of an individual layer in the wireless mobile network.We conclude that the system performance in terms of capacity, throughput, dropping probability, outage, power efficiency, delay, and fairness can be enhanced by jointly considering the interactions across layers.