Erlang Capacity of Multi-Class TDMA Systems with Adaptive Modulation and Coding

Erlang capacity is traditionally defined as the maximum value of offered traffic among different service classes that the system can support when the blocking probabilities at the call admission control (CAC) level do not exceed certain thresholds. That is valid when a fixed amount of bandwidth is allocated to each user in each frame during the whole service time. However, with the introduction of adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme employed at the physical layer, outage might occur due to the fact that the allocation of bandwidth is dynamic based on the time-varying wireless channel conditions. In this paper, we evaluate the Erlang capacity of a TDMA system with AMC supporting voice and data traffics, by taking both the blocking and the outage probabilities into account. The analytical models for calculating the blocking and the outage probabilities are developed separately, and a joint algorithm for determining the Erlang capacity of the system is proposed with some numerical examples.