GAME THEORETIC APPROACH TO RADIO RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ON THE REVERSE LINK FOR MULTI-RATE CDMA WIRELESS DATA NETWORKS

This work deals with efficient power and rate assignment to mobile stations (MSs) involved in bursty data transmission in cellular CDMA networks. Power control in the current CDMA standards is based on a fixed target signal quality called signal to interference ratio (SIR). The target SIR represents a predefined frame error rate (FER). This approach is inefficient for data-MSs because a fixed target SIR can limit the MS's throughput. Power control should thus provide dynamic target SIRs instead of a fixed target SIR. In the research literature, the power control problem has been modeled using game theory. A limitation of the current literature is that in order to implement the algorithms, each MS needs to know information such as path gains and transmission rates of all other MSs. Fast rate control schemes in the evolving cellular data systems such as cdma2000-1x-EV assign transmission rates to MSs using a probabilistic approach. The limitation here is that the radio resources can be either under or over-utilized. Further, all MSs are not assigned the same rates. In the schemes proposed in the literature, only few MSs, which have the best channel conditions, obtain all radio resources. In this dissertation, we address the power control issue by moving the computation of the Nash equilibrium from each MS to the base station (BS). We also propose equal radio resource allocation for all MSs under the constraint that only the maximum allowable radio resources are used in a cell. This dissertation addresses the problem of how to efficiently assign power and rate to MSs based on dynamic target SIRs for bursty transmissions. The proposed schemes in this work maximize the throughput of each data-MS while still providing equal allocation of radio resources to all MSs and achieving full radio resource utilization in each cell. The proposed schemes result in power and rate control algorithms that however require some assistance from the BS. The performance evaluation and comparisons with cdma2000-1x-Evolution Data Only (1x-EV-DO) show that the proposed schemes can provide better effective rates (rates after error) than the existing schemes