CRDA: a collision resolution and dynamic allocation MAC protocol to integrate data and voice in wireless networks

One key requirement for radio access in advanced, third generation (3G) mobile communication systems is the ability to accommodate a variety of services via a flexible and efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol. The paper presents and evaluates a new multiple access protocol termed CRDA (collision resolution and dynamic allocation), which has the potential to meet the above requirement. CRDA is basically a slotted packet-reservation multiple access technique with dedicated reservation slots, which allows the main shortcoming of previous PRMA schemes, i.e., contention, to be overcome through the integration in the MAC protocol of a code-division multiple-access (CDMA) transmission mode used to access the reservation slots. This prevents collisions during the reservation phase and enhances channel throughput, notably in the case of mixed voice/data traffic. Our simulations of the CRDA MAC integrate voice channels with data sources, generating what we call advanced data traffic, which has a very similar shape to the actual traffic generated by World Wide Web (WWW) applications. The standard assumption of Poissonian data traffic is also considered. Our conclusion is that the CRDA MAC protocol satisfactorily accommodates both types of traffic