DISTRIBUTED SWITCHING AND CONTROL WITH FAST RESOURCE ASSIGNMENT HANDOFF FOR PERSONAL COMMUNICATIONS-SYSTEMS

In this paper we present a novel architecture for a combined personal, mobile, and (possibly) loop access microcellular communications system in which calls are digitized and packetized. A network of microcells is utilized to communicate with the various subscribers via radio. Calls handled by clusters of microcells are channeled to base stations via optical fibers. From there the calls are trunked directly to neighborhood exchanges of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Switching and control are decentralized and distributed between base stations and local exchanges of the PSTN. There is no need for large and sophisticated centralized switches and/or controllers. In the context of packetized communications, most of the switching functions in the base stations reduce to route translation (lookup tables) and memory transfers. A novel fast handoff/resource assignment process is introduced. It is subscriber-controlled and is jointly performed by the subscribers and base station employing the Resource Auction Multiple Access (RAMA) algorithm. In this deterministic algorithm, resource utilization is independent of traffic load. Using selected GSM parameters with RAMA, for the purpose of illustration, we show that, in microcells with delays of 1 mus, 1080 resource assignments per second are feasible; and with delays as high as 45 mus, 216 assignments per second are feasible.