Self-adaptive channel allocation strategies in cellular environments with PRMA

The personal communication systems envisaged for the future will have to accommodate a wide range of services with different quality requirements (on delays, retransmission rates, etc.), and often characterized by relatively short traffic burst interleaved by comparatively long silence periods. Therefore, an extension of packet communications to the cellular scenario is appealing for its inherent flexibility. The packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) protocol is considered. On the other hand, the current trend in reducing cell sizes poses major planning problems, which cannot be properly coped with by the usual fixed channel allocation methods; therefore, adaptive allocation schemes are currently studied. In this paper a self-adaptive assignment method (channel segregation), originally developed for TDMA/FDMA systems, is conveniently adapted for PRMA operations. Simulations show good performance, provided that values of some system variables are correctly chosen. These results encourage further studies in order to refine adaptive methods suitable for cellular, packet switched personal communications systems