Enhancing the Physical Layer of Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted ALOHA

There is an urgent need for substantially enhancing random access schemes to be able to support native massive machine-to-machine communications in the next generation wireless systems. Lately, contention resolution diversity slotted ALOHA (CRDSA) and its variants have contributed to a drastic improvement in throughput compared with the traditional slotted ALOHA protocols. In this paper, we further enhance the CRDSA flexibility and performance along different physical layer dimensions. Based on simulation results, we show that there is still room for improvement in terms of throughput and, using heuristic methods, we find an optimized distribution of the packets power that is entering the demodulator for an additive white Gaussian noise channel. Applying this power distribution, which is easy to implement at the terminal in open loop and in a decentralized manner, is shown to achieve significantly enhanced performance. By introducing multi-frequency CRDSA, a drastic reduction in the terminal's peak power requirement is attained. Furthermore, we investigate spread spectrum CRDSA, which improves the robustness of the scheme against irresolvable packet collisions allowing for enhanced energy efficiency. To support the work presented herein, we have developed a computationally efficient yet accurate methodology for estimating CRDSA performance, a novel approximate centrally coordinated CRDSA achievable sum rate analysis accounting for modulation and forward error correction constraints, as well as a more accurate loop probability analysis.