Perfect-Capture ALOHA for Local Radio Communications

We consider a set of uncoordinated users employing an ALOHA protocol to transmit packets to a central base station in a local radio environment, e.g., in an urban area or within a building. Because of the different distances between the various users and the base station, the signals received from different users have substantially different power levels. This near/far phenomenon gives rise to a capture effect at the receiver such that when several packets are transmitted simultaneously, the receiver has a good chance of accurately detecting the packet arriving with the highest energy. Moreover, capture can be made near perfect in this environment through the use of properly design spread-spectrum signaling technique that enables the receiver to differentiate among the arriving packets based on both power differences and differing arrival times. We investigate variations to the conventional ALOHA protocols that take advantage of perfect capture to reduce the delays and increase the throughputs of all users, including the furthest one. Three protocols are introduced and compared, which we call "persistent ALOHA with capture" (PAC), "gated ALOHA with capture" (GAC), and "gated ALOHA with capture/exhausted" (GAC/E). Two goals are considered in the comparison: an equatable delay profile among the users, and a small expected number of simultaneously transmitted packets. The latter is quite relevant for the practical implementation of a perfect-capture receiver. We conclude that the GAC/E protocol is most desirable from the twin points of view of delay profile and receiver implementation.