A perfectly stable contention access scheme for wireless access networks

Existing TDM-based contention access schemes exhibit the unstable or load-susceptible problem in which throughput exponentially deteriorates as the traffic offered load increases or fluctuates. In this paper, we propose a persistently stable, efficient hexanary-feedback-based contention access (HFCA) scheme, aiming to provide QoS guarantee while retaining stable and maximal network throughput. Unlike existing schemes that consider all contending mobile terminals as a whole, HFCA incrementally resolves a small group of terminals each time via a two-phase selection/resolution process. The incremental resolution repeats until the minimum non-blocking probability (QoS for signaling traffic) is satisfied. To accelerate resolution within the process, the number of simultaneously transmitting terminals is estimated based on an envelope-pdf-based estimator (EPER), by matching the corresponding normalized envelope histogram of the receiving signal with the priori envelope-pdf library. Facilitated with incremental resolution and the EPER, HFCA achieves the highest maximum throughput (0.574) and saturated throughput (0.52) reported to date irrespective of traffic increase and variation.