A Channel Access Protocol for Integrated Voice/Data Applications

A new multiaccess protocol is proposed for an integrated voice/data application. The protocol, which is a variation of virtual time CSMA (VT-CSMA), takes advantage of the periodicity of voice packets and possesses a number of important features. With this protocol, voice stations appear to have a dedicated time-division multiplexed (TDM) slot, and the delay of a voice packet is bounded by the length of a frame (defined to be the period between two consecutive voice packets from a voice station). Also, the amount of data added to the channel has little effect on the voice traffic. When silence detection is used, many more voice conversations can be supported without losing the dedicated-slot characteristic. This is in contrast to a movingboundary TDM system where the excessive bandwidth saved by silence detection can only be used for data. The protocol requires no global synchronization and is easy to implement. Simulation results are presented to evaluate its performance.