Frameless ALOHA protocol for wireless networks

Abstract

We propose a novel distributed random access scheme for wireless networks based on slotted ALOHA, motivated by the analogies between successive interference cancellation and iterative belief-propagation decoding on erasure channels. The proposed scheme assumes that each user independently accesses the wireless link in each slot with a predefined probability, resulting in a distribution of user transmissions over slots. The operation bears analogy with rateless codes, both in terms of probability distributions as well as to the fact that the ALOHA frame becomes fluid and adapted to the current contention process. Our aim is to optimize the slot access probability in order to achieve rateless-like distributions, focusing both on the maximization of the resolution probability of user transmissions and the throughput of the scheme. © 1997-2012 IEEE.