Distributed medium access control for next-generation CDMA wireless networks

The next-generation wireless networks are expected to have a simple infrastructure with distributed control. In this article, we consider a generic distributed network model for future wireless multimedia communications with a code-division multiple access (CDMA) air interface. For the medium access control (MAC) of the network model, we provide an overview of recent research efforts on distributed code assignment and interference control and identify their limitations when applied in next-generation wireless networks supporting multimedia traffic. We also propose a novel distributed MAC scheme to address these limitations, where active receivers determine whether a candidate transmitter should transmit its traffic or defer its transmission to a later time. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed MAC scheme.