Design Issues of Media Access Control (MAC) Protocol for Multi-media Traffic Over DS-CDMA Systems

We propose an efficient uplink MAC protocol for a variable spreading gain interference-limited WCDMA system. It can, with high spectral efficiency, support both real-time traffic like speech and video and also non-real-time data traffic based on packet transmission. The schemes for power allocation, scheduling, and transmission rate adaptation for non-real time data traffic schemes are designed as integrated parts of the MAC, working jointly to improve the system performance. With these associated resource management mechanisms, the performance of the MAC protocol with two different channel allocation methods for RT traffic are compared (one is demanding channel allocation, and the other is named reserved channel allocation, in which a certain bandwidth is reserved for concurrent RT traffic).