Capture-division packetized access (CDPA) for cellular systems

The paper presents a new cellular architecture for radio access, CDPA, that can be applied to present and future cellular systems, independently of the cell size. It poses as an appealing alternative to systems based on classical bandwidth-subdivision methods, namely TDMA, FDMA or CDMA. In these systems, parallelism of communications is achieved by subdividing the bandwidth “a priori” among cells. In CDPA no bandwidth subdivision is operated. All cells and terminals use a single frequency channel and transmit packets on a slotted channel. Parallel transmission in different cells is achieved through the “capture” capability. A dynamic polling mechanism, C-PRMA, managed by the base station, guarantees almost immediate re-transmission of packets that are not captured, thus assuring that packets are eventually correctly received. Analytical evaluations show that CDPA has the potential to provide larger capacity than the other cited systems in the case of continuous traffic sources. Furthermore, as C-PRMA is inherently apt to sustain bursty traffic, the system capacity is easily doubled in the case of packetized voice transmission using silence suppression