An analysis on the state-dependent nature of DS/SSMA unslotted ALOHA

In this paper, we present a novel approach to analyze the throughput of direct-sequence spread spectrum multiple access (DS/SSMA) unslotted ALOHA system. In the unslotted system, the departure rate of interfering transmissions is proportional to the number of current interferers that can be regarded as the system state. In order to model this state-dependency, we introduce a two-dimensional state transition model that describes the state transition of the system. This model provides a more rigorous analysis tool for the DS/SSMA unslotted ALOHA systems with both fixed and variable packet lengths. Numerical results reveal that this analysis yields an accurate system performance that coincides with the simulation results. Throughout the analysis we have discovered that the state-dependency of the departure rate causes interference averaging effect in the unslotted system and that this effect yields a higher throughput for the unslotted system than for the slotted system when supported by a strong channel coding.