Effect of slot size on TDMA performance in presence of per slot overhead

The problem of optimum slot size in the time division multiplexing (TDM) scheme in the presence of per slot overhead is addressed. Per slot overhead occurs in a variety of network structures. Messages are assumed to be of random length, so they may need to be segmented into several slots, and are assumed to be arriving according to a Poisson process. Optimum slot is derived as a function of input rate, message length distribution, overhead per slot, and number of stations. It is also shown how one will be penalized by deviating from this optimum slot size. Guidelines are provided on how to assign unequal slot sizes in cases where different stations have different traffic characteristics. It is shown that this is a cumbersome nonlinear optimization programming problem in general, which reduces to a Kuhn-Tucker optimization programming problem in light traffic situations.<>