Error Floor Analysis of Irregular Repetition ALOHA

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the error floor performance of irregular repetition ALOHA in asynchronous random access, providing an analytical approximation validated by numerical results, relevant for IoT communication systems.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical approximation for the error floor of IRA in asynchronous settings, enhancing understanding of its performance limits.

Findings

The approximation is tight across various scenarios.

IRA performance in the error floor region is characterized.

Numerical results confirm the analytical model's accuracy.

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things, the efficient sharing of the wireless medium by a large amount of simple transmitters is becoming essential. Scheduling-based solutions are inefficient for this setting, where small data units are broadcast sporadically by terminals that most of the time are idle. Modern random access has embraced the challenge and provides suitable slot-synchronous and asynchronous multiple access solutions based on replicating the packets and exploiting successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver. In this work, we focus on asynchronous modern random access. Specifically, we derive an analytical approximation of the performance of irregular repetition ALOHA (IRA) in the so-called error floor region. Numerical results show the tightness of the derived approximation under various scenarios.