Performance analysis of frame reservation multiple access

In packet reservation multiple access (PRMA), the base station broadcasts an acknowledgment message after every slot. The terminals listen to this acknowledgment and immediately learn the result of their transmission (if any) and the status (available/reserved) of that slot. This requires all terminals to listen to acknowledgments in all slots. The authors consider a variant of this scheme, frame reservation multiple access (FRMA), where the base station broadcasts the acknowledgments for all the slots in a frame at the end of the frame. This results in reduced receiver activity, something that is commonly achieved in TDMA. This system has been modeled as a Markov chain and a precise analysis of its performance, in terms of packet dropping, is presented. Along with analysis of the fixed permission probability scheme, where all the terminals use a fixed value for the permission probability, the authors propose an adaptive permission probability scheme where the permission probability is chosen depending on the number of reserved slots at the beginning of a frame. The permission probabilities that minimize packet dropping have also been computed by solving a nonlinear programming problem.<>