Frame arrangement on multiple frequency carriers in TDD based PRMA

This paper studies the different arrangements of frames in the time division duplexing (TDD)-based packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) protocol on multiple frequency carriers. Two frame arrangements, namely, aligned and slanted arrangement, are investigated. In the aligned arrangement, frame boundaries are aligned on all frequency carriers, in the slanted arrangement, the frame boundaries are shifted by one slot from one frequency carrier to the next. With slanted frame arrangement, a scheme is proposed to enable a mobile terminal to switch among different frequency carriers such that shorter time is required to obtain a slot at the beginning of a talk spurt. Extensive simulations are performed to compare the performance of the two arrangements of frames. Simulation results show that the slanted frame arrangement yields significantly lower mean request waiting time and packet dropping ratio than the aligned frame arrangement.