Cooperative Slotted Aloha for Multi-Base Station Systems

TL;DR

This paper studies cooperative slotted Aloha in multi-base station systems, demonstrating how different cooperation strategies improve throughput and decoding probability, with optimized user transmission strategies for enhanced performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework analyzing various cooperation algorithms in multi-base station slotted Aloha, revealing fundamental throughput and decoding probability behaviors.

Findings

Peak throughput increases linearly with the number of base stations.

Temporal and spatio-temporal cooperation exhibit threshold behavior in normalized load.

Optimal user transmission degree distribution differs from single-base station systems.

Abstract

We introduce a framework to study slotted Aloha with cooperative base stations. Assuming a geographic-proximity communication model, we propose several decoding algorithmswith different degrees of base stations' cooperation (non-cooperative, spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal). With spatial cooperation, neighboring base stations inform each other whenever they collect a user within their coverage overlap; temporal cooperation corresponds to (temporal) successive interference cancellation done locally at each station. We analyze the four decoding algorithms and establish several fundamental results. With all algorithms, the peak throughput (average number of decoded users per slot, across all base stations) increases linearly with the number of base stations. Further, temporal and spatio-temporal cooperations exhibit a threshold behavior with respect to the normalized load (number of users per station, per slot). There exists a positive load $G^\star$, such that, below $G^\star$, the decoding probability is asymptotically maximal possible, equal the probability that a user is heard by at least one base station; with non-cooperative decoding and spatial cooperation, we show that $G^\star$ is zero. Finally, with spatio-temporal cooperation, we optimize the degree distribution according to which users transmit their packet replicas; the optimum is in general very different from the corresponding optimal distribution of the single-base station system.