Multi-cell aware opportunistic random access

Abstract

We propose a decentralized multi-cell aware opportunistic random access (MA-ORA) protocol that almost achieves the optimal throughput scaling in a K-cell random access network with one access point (AP) and N users in each cell. Under our MA-ORA protocol, users opportunistically transmit with a predefined physical layer data rate in a decentralized manner if the desired signal power to the serving AP is sufficiently large and the generating interference power to other APs is sufficiently small. It is proved that the aggregate throughput scales as k/e (1 − ∊)log(SNR log N) in a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime if N scales faster than SNR k−1/1−δ for small constants ∊,δ > 0. Our analytical result is validated by computer simulations.