Potential benefits of using partial loading principles in the design of TDMA systems

Partial loading can be adopted as a design principle of TDMA systems. This paper evaluates the performance, in terms of outage probability due to co-channel interference, of a partially loaded packet based TDMA system. The impact of ideal power control, dynamic slot allocation and dynamic traffic fluctuations is considered. It is shown that the plain introduction of partial loading is accompanied by an overall decrease in spectral efficiency. However, after the application of a dynamic slot allocation strategy, and when considering dynamic traffic fluctuations, the decrease in performance is compensated for. This makes partial loading potentially attractive, since it introduces an overall increase in flexibility in the management of the available radio resources, whilst maintaining similar spectral efficiencies to more classical and rigid design approaches