Packetized access has several potential advantages over conventional circuit switched based access. It readily accommodates information from diverse sources. Packet switching with speech activity detector increases channel utilization and simplifies service integration for mobile terminals. Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA) was proposed by Goodman et. al This method shows a large improvement in capacity by statistical multiplexing of active users. However, the advantage of packet access is significantly limited by cochannel interference and traffic conditions. We propose an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for improving link quality of packetized access in the cellular environment. The proposed protocol provides an adaptive access mechanism to achieve a balance bet...[ Read more ]

Packetized access has several potential advantages over conventional circuit switched based access. It readily accommodates information from diverse sources. Packet switching with speech activity detector increases channel utilization and simplifies service integration for mobile terminals. Packet Reservation Multiple Access (PRMA) was proposed by Goodman et. al This method shows a large improvement in capacity by statistical multiplexing of active users. However, the advantage of packet access is significantly limited by cochannel interference and traffic conditions. We propose an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for improving link quality of packetized access in the cellular environment. The proposed protocol provides an adaptive access mechanism to achieve a balance between traffic throughput and signal quality.

We perform computer simulations to study the performance of our protocol, using voice as an example to compare it with circuit switching in the presence of server co-channel interference. Several packet access algorithms are discussed to explain the trade off between link quality and traffic throughput. It is found that the proposed packet access protocol gives large improvement over unmodified packet access and can support at least twice as many active users per radio port as that supported by circuit switching under the same conditions. We demonstrated the applicability of our MAC protocol for data services and found that it provides a significant improvement over unmodified packet access. We also studied the protocol sensitivity to various system parameters. This method appears to be suitable for multimedia wireless access since it provides an improved performance for both voice and data applications.