Delay Analysis of OFDMA-Aloha

OFDMA is the basis of future broadband access, due to its many inherent advantages such as scalability and fine granularity for multi-user access. OFDMA-Aloha combines the flexibility of OFDMA with basic Aloha's collision resolution mechanism over sub-carriers, in an attempt to reduce packet collisions and achieve faster retransmission. However, this comes at the expense of a larger slot size, due to lower channel rates per subcarrier. The above gives rise to a fundamental question: whether to use a single wide-band Aloha channel and retransmit via random back-off in next K time slots, or to retransmit immediately in one of K narrow-band sub-channels which are each 1/K slower (OFDMA-Aloha)? We answer this question, by analyzing the two protocols: Aloha and OFDMA-Aloha under the same total bandwidth and load conditions. We first derive the exact distribution of the packet access delay of OFDMA-Aloha in the saturated case. Then, we extend the analysis to the unsaturated case and derive the mean queue length and packet delay by decomposing the system of interfering queues into multiple independent queues utilizing the symmetry in our system. Our results show that if the network is already saturated, channelization does not bring substantial reduction in the collision rate to the point where it outweighs the effect of expanded slot size. In this case the single channel Aloha performs better than OFDMA-Aloha especially when the gap between the number of channels and the number users is large. On other hand, when the network is lightly loaded, OFDMA-Aloha enjoys smaller packet delays, but not for long as it saturates faster than the single channel Aloha.