Enhanced Slotted Aloha Mechanism by Introducing ZigZag Decoding

Abstract: Various random access mechanisms, such as Aloha protocol and its corresponding variants have been widely studied as efficient methods to coordinate the medium access among competing users. But when two or more wireless users transmit packets at the same time over the same channel a collisions occur. When this happens, the received packets are discarded and retransmissions are required, which is a waste of power and bandwidth. In such a situation one of the most important objectives is to find techniques to improve these protocols to reduce the number of collisions or to avoid them. Several studies have contributed to this problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach named ZigZag decoding to enhance slotted Aloha mechanism by reducing the loss rate of packets colliding. We model the system by a Markov chain witch the number of backlogged packets is taken as the system state. We use a stochastic game to achieve our objective. We evaluate and compare the performances parameters of the proposed approach with those of slotted Aloha mechanism. All found results show that our approach is more efficient than the slotted Aloha mechanism.