Design and Performance Evaluation of an Efficient Multiple Access Protocol for Virtual Cellular Networks

Abstract

Virtual Cellular Network (VCN) is a mobile communication network which is wireless in nature. This communication network includes one Mobile Station (MS) which has the provision of communicating with many (more than one) Base Stations (BSs) at the same time. One of the inherent properties of VCN is that when the mobile station sends a signal to the base station, the base station receives it, thereby reducing the probability of outage that could be caused by shadowing. A mobile station is in continuous and parallel communication with two base stations during the phase of handing over. This communication is achieved by communicating the same data of downlink from the two base stations to the mobile station. When such a downlink data of a single mobile station is shared over multiple base stations, higher bandwidth efficiency is achieved in full virtual cellular network implementation. The VCN also gives the provision that will enable many base stations to receive the signal from one mobile station, thereby setting an environment to improve the reliability of satellite communication. In the proposed scheme, distributed multiple access protocol is used and simulation of this protocol is done using stationary users and mobile users. Every BS is considered to be a separate object which is linked by a simulated backbone which is wired. The simulator used is a time-based simulator where all the base stations are synchronized to one common clock. This paper presents the evaluation of multiple access protocol in combination with link protocol. The proposed work can be a contribution toward the design of multidisciplinary Mobile Multimedia Communications (MMC). The proposed scheme aims to support Asynchronous Transfer Mode, Internet Protocol (IP), and also a support for inexpensive mobile stations.