On Frame Asynchronous Coded Slotted ALOHA: Asymptotic, Finite Length, and Delay Analysis

We consider a frame asynchronous coded slotted ALOHA (FA-CSA) system for uncoordinated multiple access, where users join the system on a slot-by-slot basis according to a Poisson random process and, in contrast to standard frame synchronous CSA (FS-CSA), users are not frame-synchronized. We analyze the performance of FA-CSA in terms of packet loss rate and delay. In particular, we derive the (approximate) density evolution that characterizes the asymptotic performance of FA-CSA when the frame length goes to infinity. We show that, if the receiver can monitor the system before anyone starts transmitting, a boundary effect similar to that of spatially-coupled codes occurs, which greatly improves the iterative decoding threshold. Furthermore, we derive tight approximations of the error floor (EF) for the finite frame length regime, based on the probability of occurrence of the most frequent stopping sets. We show that, in general, FA-CSA provides better performance in both the EF and waterfall regions as compared to FS-CSA. Moreover, FA-CSA exhibits better delay properties than FS-CSA.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1604.0629

High-Throughput Random Access via Codes on Graphs

Recently, contention resolution diversity slotted ALOHA (CRDSA) has been introduced as a simple but effective improvement to slotted ALOHA. It relies on MAC burst repetitions and on interference cancellation to increase the normalized throughput of a classic slotted ALOHA access scheme. CRDSA allows achieving a larger throughput than slotted ALOHA, at the price of an increased average transmitted power. A way to trade-off the increment of the average transmitted power and the improvement of the throughput is presented in this paper. Specifically, it is proposed to divide each MAC burst in k sub-bursts, and to encode them via a (n,k) erasure correcting code. The n encoded sub-bursts are transmitted over the MAC channel, according to specific time/frequency-hopping patterns. Whenever n-e>=k sub-bursts (of the same burst) are received without collisions, erasure decoding allows recovering the remaining e sub-bursts (which were lost due to collisions). An interference cancellation process can then take place, removing in e slots the interference caused by the e recovered sub-bursts, possibly allowing the correct decoding of sub-bursts related to other bursts. The process is thus iterated as for the CRDSA case.Comment: Presented at the Future Network and MobileSummit 2010 Conference, Florence (Italy), June 201