Region Division Assignment: A New OVSF Code Reservation and Assignment Scheme for Downlink Capacity in W-CDMA Systems

This work focuses on the efficient management of orthogonal-variable-spreading-factor (OVSF) codes for multimedia communications in the W-CDMA systems. Because these systems must assign only OVSF codes that are mutually orthogonal, even if they have sufficient transmission capacity they block connections for which no orthogonal OVSF codes are available. This code blocking can, with extra overhead, be eliminated by reassigning codes, but in this paper we propose an OVSF code management scheme designed to not reassign codes. This scheme, called Region Division Assignment, cannot eliminate code blocking but can reduce the overhead for code assignment. Computer simulations based on the multiple access protocol in UMTS/IMT-2000 show that the proposed scheme can efficiently provide variable-rate services as well as low-rate services. This paper was presented in part at the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference Fall 2001, October 7-11, 2001, Atlantic City, NJ USA. Rujipun Assarut received his BE from Chularongkorn University, Thailand, in 1997 and his MS from Gunma University, Japan, in 2002. Currently, he is working as a software engineer for NEC communication systems. His current project is the development of IP phone for enterprise applications. Ken’ichi Kawanishi is a research associate with Gunma University, Japan. His current research interests include queueing theory and stochastic processes. He is a member of ORSJ, JSIAM and IEICE. Ushio Yamamoto received a bachelor’s degree in information engineering, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. degree in information science from Tohoku University in 1992, 1994 and 1997, respectively. He is now an associate professor in Dept. of Computer Science, Gunma University. He has been engaged in research on wireless ad hoc networks, multimedia communication networks, load balancing on computer networks and intelligent agents. He is a member of IPSJ and JSAI. Yoshikuni Onozato is a Professor with Gunma University. His research interests are in satellite systems, computer communication networks and distributed computing systems and span the entire spectrum from the design and performance evaluation of these systems to their implementation. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, IPSJ, ORSJ and IEICE.