Voice traffic capacity of base control multiple access with collision detection (BCMA/CD) for digital cellular radio

The authors describe the results of work being carried out as part of the European RACE Mobile Telecommunications Project. They present the performance of a random access packet-based system developed for digitized voice over a range of cell sizes from 100 m to 35 km. The access technique, known as base-controlled multiple access with collision detection overcomes the hidden user problem associated with digital cellular radio by transferring the collision resolution function to the base station. It is shown that this system can support higher traffic levels than existing TDMA (time-division multiple access) systems for a range of cell sizes and bit rates. BCMA/CD performance improvement over TDMA is at a maximum at small cell sizes; the speech capacity improvement drops as the cells get larger