Performance simulation of NC-PRMA with signatures in microcellular communication systems

Abstract

Packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) improves capacity in microcellular systems compared with time division multiple access (TDMA) or frequency division multiple access (FDMA). In PRMA, when a mobile terminal has information packets to transmit, it contends with other terminals for access to a common radio channel. Therefore the main performance degradation is due to the collision of terminals simultaneously transmitting packets. In this paper we propose a non-collision PRMA (NC-PRMA) protocol with signatures to achieve a better performance than PRMA does. Two classes of duplexing schemes, frequency division duplexing (FDD) and shared time division duplexing (STDD), are explored and two speech activity models, slow and fast, in both FDD and STDD schemes are studied. From the results of a computer simulation it is observed that, with the constraint of a packet-dropping rate no greater than 0·01, NC-PRMA can support 38 (43) and 45 (49) users respectively under the FDD and STDD schemes if the slow (fast) speech activity detector is adopted. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.