Evaluation of traffic capacity for integrated wireless personal communications over metropolitan area networks

Abstract

Metropolitan area networks (MANs) are well suited to support integrated voice and data personal communication services (PCS) by interconnecting wireless base stations (BSs). Whereas data transport is best supported by queue-arbitrated (QA) access to the IEEE 802.6 MAN, several alternatives exist for voice transport, including pre-arbitrated (PA) access, bi-state PA access, QA access, and reservation-arbitrated (RA) access. The voice traffic capacity of these alternatives are compared under different data traffic load. The results indicate that RA access, QA access, and bi-state PA access are preferred under low, medium, and high data traffic load, respectively, as they facilitate statistical multiplexing to almost double the capacity of PA access.