Boosting Slotted Aloha With Successive Transmission: Modeling and Performance Optimization

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Weilong Zhu, Wen Zhan, Xinghua Sun, Xiang Chen, Yuan Jiang

Published: 01 Jan 2025, Last Modified: 15 Oct 2025IEEE Trans. Commun. 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: How to effectively support massive access and data transmission in Internet of Things scenarios has been a long-standing and critical issue for various wireless communication networks. To address this issue, a flexible and efficient medium access control protocol is the key. In this paper, we propose Slotted Aloha with Successive Transmission (SAST) scheme, in which upon the successful transmission of the Head-of-Line (HoL) packet, the node delivers the remaining packets with probability 1 until the buffer is cleared or a collision occurs, thereby capitalizing on immediate channel availability. By formulating vacation queuing models of both node and channel, the access/data throughput and access/data delay are explicitly characterized and optimized by properly choosing the transmission probability of the HoL packet. Our analysis reveals that the maximum data throughput of SAST scheme is 0.5, higher than $e^{-1}$ in classic slotted Aloha. The practical insights of the analysis are also demonstrated by taking the example of 2-step Small Data Transmission (SDT) random access in 5G. It is shown that the SAST scheme can be seamlessly implemented into 5G and the comparison with 2-step SDT random access reveals that SAST can improve the throughput performance while significantly reduce the signaling overhead, nearly halved in the saturated case and up to 70% reduction in the unsaturated case.