A comparison of two multiple access protocols for voice transmission in personal communication networks

An important feature of modern mobile radio communications systems is that speech gaps during conversations are detected by speech codecs and that they are not coded into packets. This can help to decrease the number of transmitted data packets to about 50%. A main advantage is that the power consumption of a (handheld) terminal decreases accordingly. Although this technique has already been applied to several systems, there is yet a lack of protocols for PCNs that assign the unused radio channels to other connections when there is a speech gap detected. The authors compare two multiple access protocols that try to overcome this problem. The first protocol is the well known packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) and the second is a protocol of the class of demand assignment multiple access (DAMA) with explicit reservations. It comes out that the latter may perform better when it is well engineered