A new approach for medium-access control for data traffic and its adaptation to the GSM general packet radio services

The inhibit sense multiple access with polling (ISMA/P) is a packet-based medium-access control scheme for statistical multiplexing of data users over a single slotted channel of a time-division multiple-access (TDMA) cellular system. In ISMA/P, the central base station (BS) asserts control over the users by polling data in smaller blocks. This enables ISMA/P to attain a near ideal, steady, and high throughput and low-mean delay performance, which is not usually achievable by contention-reservation-based MAC schemes. In this paper, we describe the ISMA/P algorithm and provide a detailed simulation study of it over a global system for mobile communications (GSM)-like slotted channel for a traffic model adopted from European Railways applications. This study shows that ISMA/P can achieve a steady throughput of 90% over a large range of load. A number of practical advantages of ISMA/P, such as elimination of channel hogging, incorrect channel sensing, battery saving, etc., are also elaborated.