Factors affecting the bandwidth efficiency of packet reservation multiple access

The authors have extended a preliminary study of packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) by examining the influence of a large number of system variables on PRMA performance. The measure of efficiency is η, the maximum number of conversations per channel that PRMA can support within a given packet-dropping probability constraint of P_drop⩽0.01. The number of channels is defined as the ratio of channel rate to source rate. Over the range of conditions examined, many PRMA configurations are found for which η=1.6 conversations per channel. This represents an efficiency improvement of 60% over conventional time-division multiple access. The overall conclusion is that PRMA shows encouraging potential as a statistical multiplexer of speech packets