Quality-of-service provisioning in future 4G CDMA networks

It is well accepted that the 4G wireless network architecture will include different wireless access networks, glued together by Mobile IP to provide seamless Internet access to mobile users. A major challenge in establishing such a heterogeneous architecture is QoS provisioning in different wireless networks. QoS provisioning is more complex in a CDMA cellular system due to the interference-limited capacity. In this article we propose a vertically coupled protocol architecture to provide QoS in 4G CDMA cellular networks. This architecture combines the,transport layer protocols and link layer resource allocation to both guarantee the high-layer QoS requirements and achieve efficient resource utilization in the low layer. A packet-switching MAC scheme is also provided to achieve efficient multiplexing. The MAC scheduler uses only per-flow information in packet scheduling, thus significantly reducing the computation complexity and system overhead.