Interaction of TCP and data access control in an integrated voice/data CDMA system

Abstract

This paper considers the interaction between a proposed data access control scheme and the standardized error recovery schemes on the radio link of a voice/data CDMA system. A data access control scheme for combined voice-data CDMA systems has been proposed and studied in previous literature. The scheme aims to maintain a certain target voice signal to interference ratio (SIR); this is achieved by controlling the data load according to the measured voice SIR. The data users are allowed to transmit in a radio-link time slot with a certain permission probability, which is determined by the base station based on the measured voice SIR in the previous slot. As per the IS-99 standards, however, data transmission operates under the framework of TCP, which is a higher level end-to-end protocol. The TCP data unit, called a segment, is typically equivalent to several tens of physical layer frames; hence, a segment transmission takes up several tens of slots. Due to changes in the number of voice users in talkspurt (which occur on a time scale shorter than a segment transmission time), the slot level data access control scheme can introduce significant variability in the segment transmission time. The effect of such variability on the TCP timers, which operate at the segment level, is of interest. In this paper, an approximate upper bound on the data throughput, taking the presence of TCP into account, is computed. The results provide one with an insight into the interaction of the access control scheme with TCP; they also give practical pointers as to choosing suitable parameters and operating points for the scheme.