A Review of Packet Reservation Multiple Access

The rapid technological advances and innovations of the past few decades have pushed wireless communication from concept to reality. The popularity of wireless communication systems can be seen almost everywhere in the form of cellular networks, WLANs, and WPANs. Packet-switched technology has been demonstrated as effective in cellular radio systems with short propagation delay, not only for data, but also for voice transmission. In fact, packet voice can efficiently exploit speech on–off activity to improve bandwidth utilization over time division multiple access (TDMA). Such an approach has been first suggested in the packet reservation multiple-access (PRMA) technique, an adaptation of the reservation ALOHA protocol to the cellular environment. PRMA can be viewed as a combination of TDMA and slotted ALOHA protocols. Recently modified versions of the PRMA protocol have been the subject of extensive research. This paper reviews a number of variations of PRMA protocol in literature.