Performance analysis of DS/SSMA unslotted ALOHA system with variable length data traffic

We analyze the throughput of a direct-sequence spread spectrum multiple access (DS/SSMA) unslotted ALOHA system with variable length data traffic. The system is analyzed for two cases: (1) systems without a channel load sensing protocol (CLSP) and (2) systems with a CLSP. The bit-error probability and the throughput are obtained as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) during message transmission, considering the number of overlapped messages and the amount of time overlap. We assume that the generation of data messages is Poisson distributed and that the messages are divided into packets before transmission. The system is modeled as a Markov chain under the assumption that the number of packets in a message is geometrically distributed with a constant packet length. The throughput variance of the DS/SSMA unslotted ALOHA system with variable length data traffic is obtained as the Reed-Solomon code rate varies. Results show that a significant throughput improvement can be obtained by using an error-correcting code.