A novel channel-adaptive uplink access control protocol for nomadic computing

We consider the uplink access control problem in a mobile nomadic computing system, which is based on a cellular phone network in that a user can use the mobile device to transmit voice or file data. This resource management problem is important because an efficient solution to uplink access control is critical for supporting a large user population with a reasonable level of quality of service (QoS). While there are a number of recently proposed protocols for uplink access control, these protocols possess a common drawback in that they do not adapt well to the burst error properties, which are inevitable in using wireless communication channels. In this paper, we propose a novel TDMA-based uplink access protocol, which employs a channel state dependent allocation strategy. Our protocol is motivated by two observations: 1) when channel state is bad, the throughput is low due to the large amount of FEC (forward error correction) or excessive ARQ (automatic repeated request) that is needed and 2) because of item 1, much of the mobile device's energy is wasted. The proposed protocol works closely with the underlying physical layer in that, through observing the channel state information (CSI) of each mobile device, the MAC protocol first segregates a set of users with good CSI from requests gathered in the request contention phase of an uplink frame. The protocol then judiciously allocates channel bandwidth to contending users based on their channel conditions. Simulation results indicate that the proposed protocol considerably outperforms five state-of-the-art protocols in terms of packet loss, delay, and throughput.