Mobitex vs. ReFLEX/Slide8.png
ROUND 7: LATENCY
When people interact or need to do business wirelessly they expect their messages to be sent instantly. This is particularly important for truly interactive services like e-commerce and web queries where round-trip message times should be seconds, not minutes.
In a Mobitex™ network intelligence resides at all levels. Even a single base station is capable of routing messages, minimizing unnecessary delays and frequency consuming overhead. In a Mobitex™ network, the device acknowledges a message immediately and there is no need to schedule a slot or another channel for the acknowledgement. If an error is detected, only the faulty blocks of a message are requested for repetition.
In a ReFLEX™ network, intelligence resides at zone level. When messages are not transmitted correctly, the device sends a negative acknowledgement in the scheduled response slot and the complete message is transmitted again. In the entire zone.
In the latency graph, that can be studied in detail in a case study below, the over-the-air transmission time is defined as the time it takes for a data packet to be transmitted from a radio base station and acknowledged by a receiver. The average battery saving delay values are based on a collapse value of 3 (pager scans every 8th message frame) for ReFLEX™ and a skipnum value of 4 (used by Research In Motion) for Mobitex™.