A Common Information-Based Multiple Access Protocol Achieving Full Throughput and Linear Delay

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized multiple access protocol that guarantees full throughput and linear delay without collision sensing, improving efficiency in shared communication channels.

Contribution

The paper proposes the CIMA protocol, a novel decentralized approach that achieves optimal throughput and significantly reduced delay compared to existing methods.

Findings

Achieves full throughput region of the collision channel.

Results in linear delay proportional to the number of users.

Avoids collisions without the need for channel sensing.

Abstract

We consider a multiple access communication system where multiple users share a common collision channel. Each user observes its local traffic and the feedback from the channel. At each time instant the feedback from the channel is one of three messages: no transmission, successful transmission, collision. The objective is to design a transmission protocol that coordinates the users' transmissions and achieves high throughput and low delay. We present a decentralized Common Information-Based Multiple Access (CIMA) protocol that has the following features: (i) it achieves the full throughput region of the collision channel; (ii) it results in a delay that is linear in the number of users, and is significantly lower than that of CSMA protocols; (iii) it avoids collisions without channel sensing.