Capacity of the AMPS reverse control channel

We evaluate the capacity of the reverse control channel (ReCC) common to both the advanced mobile phone systems (AMPS) (TIA-553) and time-division multiple-access (TDMA) (IS-54) cellular standards. These two standards currently account for approximately 35 million cellular customers in North America. The random-access protocol employed is a variant of carrier-sense multiple-access/collision detection (CSMA/CD), which makes use of a busy/idle bit on the forward control channel (FoCC) for both “carrier sensing” and collision detection. We describe this random-access protocol in detail, obtain the ReCC throughput characteristic analytically, and show that capture has a negligible impact on the maximum ReCC throughput. The analytic result correctly predicts the maximum attainable throughput, but does not reflect ReCC features such as the maximum number of retries, which were designed to stabilize the random-access protocol. A detailed simulation study of the ReCC complements the analytic study and shows the throughput and access delay that can practically be obtained