An energy-efficient adaptive frameless ALOHA protocol

Abstract

Random access protocols are a key feature of a family of emerging communication networks such as machine-to-machine, radio frequency identification (RFID), and sensor networks. To accommodate the needs of such networks with a massive number of uncoordinated devices, new random multiple access (MAC) protocols have been proposed that aim to improve the system efficiency by resolving collisions in the received signal. In this work, we consider one of such protocols, called frameless ALOHA, and propose two techniques to improve its energy efficiency without sacrificing the network throughput. More specifically, we propose mechanisms to adaptively control the access probability at the users. The proposed mechanisms are local and like the original frameless ALOHA, no coordination between the users is needed. Our simulation results verify the improvement achieved in the energy efficiency by the proposed techniques.