An analysis of a plane cover multiple access (PCMA) cellular system in the presence of non-uniform traffic is presented. PCMA seeks to maximize the number of parallel transmissions among cells by defining virtual cells in which users transmit using different reuse factors. It is demonstrated how PCMA is novel in its ability to more efficiently service users in a system with non-uniform traffic load among cells and to adapt in real-time to changes in traffic distribution. After formally stating the optimal coverage problem, a greedy algorithm is presented and used to improve substantially over PCMA with simple, uniform resource allocation.

We develop a new media access control strategy, called plane cover multiple access (PCMA), that provides a means of allocating wireless bandwidth in a packet-based cellular system. PCMA seeks to maximize the number of parallel transmissions among cells by defining virtual cells in which users transmit using a given reuse factor. By keeping the reuse factors low, system throughput can be maximized. We show that the throughput of a simple system designed using PCMA is up to 82% more efficient than capture division packet access (CDPA), the best known alternative for the cellular mobile environment.

We present a comparison of the quality of service performance of several multi-access protocols in packet switched wireless cellular networks that support real-time connections. Our analysis shows that plane cover multiple access (PCMA) provides for the greatest use of system capacity while maintaining a given level of service quality measured in either cellular overload probability or mean overload period. For instance, given a target level of quality of service of 0.001 for maximum probability of cellular overload, over twice as many calls can be accepted in the downlink under PCMA than under capture division packet access (CDPA). Furthermore, almost 2.7 times as many calls can be accepted than under one-seventh reuse. If the target quality of service metric is mean overload period then the improvements are even more extreme with improvements of up to 2.24 times the call capacity of CDPA and up to 3.27 times the capacity of one-seventh reuse. In all cases the improvements in levels of admissible calls are even greater than the straight improvement in system throughput of PCMA over the other protocols. These results also held under a simulation study which served to validate the analytical model used.