Performance evaluation of a CDMA protocol for voice and data integration in personal communication networks

Future wireless personal communication networks (PCN's) will require voice and data service integration on the radio link. The multiaccess capability of the code-division multiple-access (CDMA) technique has been widely investigated in the recent literature. The aim of this paper is to propose a CDMA-based protocol for joint voice and data transmissions in PCN's. The performance of such a protocol has been derived by means of an analytical approach both in terms of voice packet dropping probability and mean data packet delay. Voice traffic has been modeled as having alternated talkspurts and silences, with generation of voice packets at constant rate during talkspurts and no packet generation during silence gaps. A general arrival process is assumed for the data traffic. However, numerical results are derived in the case of a Poisson process. Simulation results are given to validate our analytical predictions. The main result derived here is that the proposed CDMA-based protocol efficiently handles both voice and data traffic. In particular, it is shown that the performance of the voice subsystem is independent of the data traffic.