Irregular Repetition ALOHA with Packet Length Diversity

Abstract

We propose a generalized version of the slot- asynchronous random access scheme called Irregular Repetition ALOHA (IRA). In the proposed scheme, users are allowed to transmit their packets with varying durations independently from each other in such a way that the overall system throughput is increased. We present an asymptotic throughput analysis of the newly proposed scheme when it is used together with time diversity, i.e., by repetition of the users packets. We also optimize the probability distributions governing the repetition rates and packet durations with the aid of the developed analysis. We demonstrate that the optimized distributions achieve considerably higher throughputs than those achievable by IRA only, and we verify the asymptotic results via finite length simulations.