Markov analysis of the PRMA protocol for local wireless networks

PRMA (packet reservation multiple access) is a reservation-ALOHA access protocol specifically designed for wireless microcellular networks that handle both real-time and non-real-time traffic. We present a thorough analysis of this protocol, considering real-time traffic only, based on a suitable Markov model. The size of the model is such that it can be directly used for an exact quantitative analysis of the system. In particular, we are able to analyze the packet dropping process, by evaluating both average and distribution measures. The latter are particularly useful to characterize the degradation caused to real-time traffic (e.g., voice) by the loss of consecutive packets. Besides, we also derive from the Markov model a qualitative analysis of the system stability, based on the equilibrium point analysis (EPA) technique. By this technique, we characterize the system stability and analyze the effect on it of several system parameters (e.g., load, permission probability). This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.