Packet Switching in Radio Channels: Part 111-Polling and (Dynamic) Split-Channel Reservation Multiple Access

Here we continue the analytic study of packet switching in radio channels which we reported upon in our two previous papers [ 11, [2]. Again we consider a population of terminals communicating with a central station over a packet-switched radio channel. The allocation of bandwidth among the contending terminals can befixed [e.g., time-division multiple access (TDMA) or frequency-division multiple access (FDMA)]-,rundom [e.&, ALOHA or carrier sen? multiple access (CSMA)] or centrally controlled (e.g., polling or reservation). In this paper we show that with a large population of bursty users, (as expected) random access is superior to both futed assignment and polling. We also introduce and analyze a dynamic reservation technique which we call split-channel reservation multiple access (SRMA) which is interesting in that it is both simple and efficient over a large range of system parameters.