GPRS-PACS: evolution of T-PACS towards third generation wireless services

The Personal Access Communications System (PACS) is an air interface standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It is a low tier wireless communications system designed to support high quality voice, voiceband data, digital data, and messaging services. This paper describes third generation advancements to PACS. Our proposed protocol, GPRS-PACS, adopts principles of GPRS over the PACS physical layer to handle packet traffic. The issues covered include protocol layering, the channel and superframe structures, the RLC/MAC block formats, and the MAC layer procedures.