Performance of Random Contention PRMA: A Protocol for Fixed Wireless Access

This paper introduces a packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) with random contention for fixed wireless access communications. The performance of PRMA scheme with random contention is compared with the performances of traditional PRMA under permission contention scheme. The proposed scheme is a simpler contention mechanism that does not depend on a pre-determined permission probability as PRMA under permission contention scheme. In this new method, terminals select the contention slot uniformly from the pool of remaining free slots in the current frame. We evaluate the performance of the new contention mechanism in terms of various metrics including maximum number of carried voice calls and packet delays for a given acceptable drop rate of voice packets. We show that the new mechanism is superior to that of PRMA under permission contention scheme for loaded systems and is expected to be insensitive for traffic source burstiness.