A new EDGE medium access control mechanism using adaptive traffic load slotted ALOHA

Abstract

We propose a new medium access control mechanism for EDGE. This strategy employs the slotted ALOHA random multiple access based on the traffic load of the system. Slotted ALOHA reaches the maximum throughput of 36% at a normalized traffic load of 1 packet per slot transmission time. Adaptive traffic load S-ALOHA keeps the maximum throughput for normalized offered load higher than one, by assigning a probability to transmit to each user in the system. In this way, we maintain the throughput constant at the maximum value for all normalized traffic loads bigger than 1 packet per time slot and we keep the blocking probability lower than the original slotted ALOHA protocol. In particular, we consider the EDGE frame structure and slot duration but this is a general medium access control mechanism that can be employed by all S-ALOHA protocols with a minimum modification.