Air-interface of high data rate wireless access

High data rate, reliable wireless access has been the focus in the design of the future wireless broadband communications. The wireless access is increasingly becoming data centric, and has to meet the requirements of a wide array of traffic ranging from voice, multimedia, and other real-time applications. The technology that work behind the scenes to make all this happen is constantly improving; improvements in the physical layer including new coding and modulation schemes that use spatial multiplexing (transmitting and receiving signals through multiple antennas), and improvements in medium access strategy (currently physical agnostic) is analyzed. The role of MIMO MAC and inter-layer interactions in wireless open system interface are identified, to lay the framework for a cross-layer design, of a physical aware medium access layer.