Discrete-time analysis of a CPCH access scheme in W-CDMA

Common packet channel (CPCH) access is an efficient approach to support packet data transmissions in a wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA) system. Rather than using a continuous-time analysis approach, this paper presents a discrete-time analysis of the CPCH access scheme to fully characterize the complete CPCH operation process. Previous studies using the continuous-time analysis only models a portion of the CPCH process. We assume that a packet arrival process is Poisson distributed and the service time of each packet is geometrically distributed. The study focuses on examining the number of packet arrivals in each CPCH access slot. Performance is evaluated in terms of normalized throughput and it is observed that CPCH performs better when packet mean service time is larger. The performance results are also compared with previous studies using continuous-time analyses