Index Terms-Communication systems performance, equilibrium point analysis (EPA), protocols. Currently, a great number of telecommunications actors are testing and evaluating the real market demand of interactive multimedia services for residential and business customers. Even if cable (coaxial and optical fiber) has demonstrated that it is able to satisfy the appetite for such services in most scenarios, there are particular areas where cellular radio systems offer a viable complementary solution by virtue of fast deployment, minimum infrastructure impact within cities, and cost effectiveness in rural or sparse populated areas. For these reasons, an European consortium called Cellular Radio Access Broadband Services (CRABS) has developed an ambitious project to provide digital interactive services via microwave cellular radio. As regards the access protocol for CRABS, the authors have proposed an efficient random-access and packet-switching technique [1]-[3], easily implementable with current cellular radio technologies, to handle the uplink of the multimedia distribution systems. It has been called contention time-division multiple access (C-TDMA). In this correspondence, a complete statistical analysis is presented for the C-TDMA in a single-medium environment. The analysis is performed under the assumption of a Markovian model of the traffic offered to the system. However, typical values of the system parameters (number of users, number of channels, etc.), leading to a very large number of system states, cause serious difficulties for the performance evaluation by a detailed analysis. To overcome this drawback, an effective and simple mathematical method called equilibrium point analysis (EPA) [5], [6] is used to obtain very significant estimates of the C-TDMA performance. This correspondence is organized as follows. In Section II, a general description of the C-TDMA protocol is given. Section III presents the proposed statistical Markov model of the C-TDMA traffic and develops the complete statistical analysis of the system. The EPA method Manuscript received May 20, 1999; revised November 6, 2001. The authors are with the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica, Universitá di Padova, 35131 Padova, zanella@dei.unipd.it; sall@dei.unipd.it). Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9545(02)02495-7. 0018-9545/02$17.00 © 2002 IEEE
Authors in REF proposed a hybrid access protocol known, as contention time-division multiple access (C-TDMA).
Contention-TDMA protocol: performance evaluation
IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technology
IEEE Trans. Vehicular Technology
Computer Science