Delay-Sensitive Distributed Power and Transmission Threshold Control for S-ALOHA Network with Finite State Markov Fading Channels

TL;DR

This paper develops a low-complexity, delay-sensitive power and threshold control policy for S-ALOHA networks with Markov fading channels, significantly improving delay performance over traditional throughput-focused methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decomposition approach to derive feasible, low-complexity control policies for delay-sensitive S-ALOHA networks with finite state Markov channels.

Findings

Delay performance is substantially improved compared to conventional methods.

The proposed solution reduces complexity to O(NJ) for power control.

A structured low-complexity solution is derived for threshold control.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the delay-sensitive power and transmission threshold control design in S-ALOHA network with FSMC fading channels. The random access system consists of an access point with K competing users, each has access to the local channel state information (CSI) and queue state information (QSI) as well as the common feedback (ACK/NAK/Collision) from the access point. We seek to derive the delay-optimal control policy (composed of threshold and power control). The optimization problem belongs to the memoryless policy K-agent infinite horizon decentralized Markov decision process (DEC-MDP), and finding the optimal policy is shown to be computationally intractable. To obtain a feasible and low complexity solution, we recast the optimization problem into two subproblems, namely the power control and the threshold control problem. For a given threshold control policy, the power control problem is decomposed into a reduced state MDP for single user so that the overall complexity is O(NJ), where N and J are the buffer size and the cardinality of the CSI states. For the threshold control problem, we exploit some special structure of the collision channel and common feedback information to derive a low complexity solution. The delay performance of the proposed design is shown to have substantial gain relative to conventional throughput optimal approaches for S-ALOHA.