Improved MAC protocol for reverse link packet data transmission in wideband DS-CDMA

This paper introduces and analyses a novel medium access control protocol for reverse links in wideband direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) mobile systems. The proposed protocol is particularly efficient when data consists of short packets. The new MAC protocol uses the time taken by the receiver to process the packets (the processing delay) to admit a new packet. When packet arrival is assumed to be Poisson, analysis and simulations show consistently that, for short packets, the new MAC scheme can handle a higher arrival rate than the conventional one, in which the processing delay is not used. The new MAC scheme shows only slight throughput degradation, a high utilization of the packet-switched data channel, and achieves a fair treatment of mobile stations.