A NEW PROTOCOL FOR THE INTEGRATION OF VOICE AND DATA OVER PRMA

A new scheme for the integration of voice and data based on packet res ervation multiple access (PRMA) is proposed. The voice and the data su bsystems are logically separated, The total available bandwidth is div ided into three regions-voice information, voice contention, and data regions. The available bandwidth is dynamically partitioned between th e above three regions subject to the fulfillment of the quality of ser vice (QoS) requirements of the voice users. The voice subsystem has be en modeled as a Markov chain and an exact analytical method to compute the voice packet dropping probability is described, A nonlinear progr amming problem is formulated to optimize the bandwidth allocated for t he data users. Solutions to this nonlinear programming problem that ar e very close to optimum have been obtained heuristically. Numerical re sults indicate that a significant amount of data traffic can be suppor ted without sacrificing the voice capacity of the system.