The analogies between successive interference cancellation (SIC) in slotted
ALOHA framework and iterative belief-propagation erasure-decoding, established
recently, enabled the application of the erasure-coding theory and tools to
design random access schemes. This approach leads to throughput substantially
higher than the one offered by the traditional slotted ALOHA. In the simplest
setting, SIC progresses when a successful decoding occurs for a single user
transmission. In this paper we consider a more general setting of a channel
with capture and explore how such physical model affects the design of the
coded random access protocol. Specifically, we assess the impact of capture
effect in Rayleigh fading scenario on the design of SIC-enabled slotted ALOHA
schemes. We provide analytical treatment of frameless ALOHA, which is a special
case of SIC-enabled ALOHA scheme. We demonstrate both through analytical and
simulation results that the capture effect can be very beneficial in terms of
achieved throughput.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE WCNC'14 Track 2 (MAC and
Cross-Layer Design
