Performance of space-division multiple-access (SDMA) with scheduling

Efficient exploitation of spatial diversity is fundamentally important to resource critical wireless applications [Tsoulos (1999)]. In this paper, we first study the performance of intelligent scheduling for space-division multiple-access (SDMA) wireless networks [Suard (1998), Farsakh (1998)]. Based on the existing scheme, we propose a new medium access protocol (MAC) for multimedia SDMA/time-division multiple-access (TDMA) packet networks [Xu (1994), Ward (1993)]. The improved protocol performs scheduling based on users' spatial characteristics and quality-of-service parameters to achieve throughput multiplication and packet delay reduction. Performance of SDMA with scheduling is evaluated under mixed audio and data traffic patterns and results show that significant improvement in network performance can be achieved under the new protocol.