Time division multiple access methods for wireless personal communications

Time division multiple access (TDMA) is a classic approach to multiple access in digital cellular wireless communications systems. The authors summarize a number of frequency and time slot allocation techniques for enhancing the capacity and flexibility of TDMA-based systems. They also describe how the problems of fading, delay spread, time variability and interference affect TDMA systems, and how they may he countered and even exploited by appropriate techniques of detection, diversity, coding, adaptive equalization and slow frequency hopping (FH). It is worth emphasizing that the use of one of these techniques, slow random FH, results in a system that is in effect a hybrid of TDMA and code division multiple access (CDMA)