An indexed access mechanism for wireless networks

The wireless communications industry has experienced some radical changes due to increased demand for wireless communications that can no longer be met with present technologies. One example of such networks is a cellular wireless network. This paper describes a new medium access mechanism-indexed RAMA (resource auction multiple access) or I-RAMA for wireless networks. This access mechanism is basically an extension of the RAMA protocol. The main objective of I-RAMA is to reduce the amount of overhead and wastage of resources associated with the resource auction in RAMA. I-RAMA uses variable length resource auctions (as opposed to the fixed length auctions in RAMA) and the length of the auction depends on the time it takes the base station to uniquely identify a mobile station. The evaluation of I-RAMA is performed by using simulation. The results show that I-RAMA consistently performs better than RAMA in terms of overhead, discarding probability, and average access delay.