A PACKET CHANNEL SHARING PROTOCOL FOR MICROCELLULAR MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS

Because new microcellular systems have high-speed transmission, they a re expected to provide the infrastructure for voice and data communica tion. To implement packet radio communication on such systems, packet channel sharing protocol for DCA systems (PCSD) scheme is proposed for sharing dynamically assigned TDMA channels with circuit-switched call s. In this protocol, packet channels ate temporally established only w hen packets are generated. This is done by: transmitting downlink sign als, consecutively, from a cell station (CS); and subsequent uplink pa ckets are transmitted in accordance with the access control signal ass ociated with each downlink signal. If no packet is transmitted within a predetermined period, the CS stops downlink transmission to release the packet channel. The characteristics of this protocol are evaluated using computer simulations of four-channel TDMA/TDD. The results indi cate that the protocol improves channel capacity by more than 10 perce nt (when packet throughput is 0.2) compared to individual assignment i n which channels are separately assigned to packet and circuit-switche d calls, respectively, without deteriorating packet throughput.