The effect of channel errors on the performance of a contention-based tdma protocol

A previously proposed contention-based TDMA protocol is modified to remain operational for a channel which is not noise free. The protocol is a mixture of random accessing and time division multiplexing and is suitable for data transmission through a channel which is characterized by non-negligible round-trip signal propagation delay. The effect of channel errors on the performance of the protocol is studied. Through numerical calculation it is observed that for the bit-error-rates encountered in practice the protocol remains stable. When the channel becomes rather noisy, error correcting codes can be imbedded to improve the performance. The validity of analysis has been verified by computer simulation.