Plane cover multiple access: a media access control strategy for wireless environments

In order to support future demand for mobile, wireless data communications, a packet based transmission scheme needs to be adopted. Such a paradigm could support data as well as voice and multimedia transmissions and would use the scarce wireless spectrum in a more efficient way than the conventional circuit switched model. We present a media access control strategy, called plane cover multiple access (PCMA), which provides a means of allocating wireless bandwidth in a packet based system. Mobiles in all cells are assigned various reuse factors and bandwidth is allocated in the form of time slots to users such that their reuse factors are preserved on a system wide basis. As such, we are proposing a simplified version of the real-time packet scheduling problem. In its simplest form, reuse factors are determined by the position within a cell in a way that essentially remains fixed after being established as part of the system design, assuming a fixed traffic distribution. However, the reuse factor determination may change in real-time to account for changing system traffic distributions. Through a simple example of PCMA we show that considerable increases in system capacity can be gained by careful selection of the reuse factors. Our example achieves a system utilization factor of almost 2 times that of the standard one-seventh frequency reuse plan. Finally, PCMA is ideal for supporting non-uniform user traffic and can easily adjust to time varying user traffic patterns so as to maximize system throughput