Short-term Fairness Analysis of Connection-based Slotted-Aloha

Abstract

Slotted-Aloha (S-Aloha) has been widely employed in random access networks owing to its simple implementation in a distributed manner. To enhance the throughput performance of the S-Aloha, connection-based slotted-Aloha (CS-Aloha) has been proposed in recent years. The fundamental principle of the CS-Aloha is to establish a connection with a short-sized request packet before transmitting data packets. Subsequently, the connected node transmits long-sized data packets in a batch of size M. This approach efficiently reduces collisions, resulting in improved throughput compared to the S-Aloha, particularly for a large M. In this paper, we address the short-term fairness of the CS-Aloha, as quantified by Jain’s fairness index. Specifically, we evaluate how equitably the CS-Aloha allocates time slots to all nodes in the network within a finite time interval. Through simulation studies, we identify the impact of system parameters on the short-term fairness of the CS-Aloha and propose an optimal transmission probability to support short-term fairness.