Abstract
This paper studies different arrangements of frames in the TDD based PRMA protocol on multiple frequency carriers. Two frame arrangements, namely, aligned and slanted arrangements, are investigated. In the aligned arrangement, frame boundaries are aligned on all frequency carriers. In the slanted arrangement, the frame boundaries are shifted by one slot from one frequency carrier to the next. With slanted frame arrangement, a scheme is proposed to enable a mobile terminal to switch among different frequency carriers such that shorter time is required to obtain a slot at the beginning of a talk spurt. Extensive simulations are performed to compare the performance of the two arrangements of frames. Our simulation results show that the slanted frame arrangement yields significantly lower mean request waiting time and packet dropping ratio than the aligned frame arrangement. ©2003 IEEE.