A general analysis of the packet delay in TDMA channels with contiguous-slot assignments

A TDMA scheme with contiguous-slot allocation for the stations is considered. For this kind of system, I. Rubin and Z. Zhang (1988) have derived an exact expression for the probability generating function of the packet delay, assuming a geometric or a Bernoulli arrival stream, while an approximate expression was obtained by H. Bruneel (1986), considering a general arrival process. The authors derive an exact closed-form expression which is valid for general independent arrivals. Also presented are simple and tight upper and lower bounds for the mean packet delay