On the Aloha throughput-fairness tradeoff

Abstract: A well-known inner bound of the stability region of the slotted Aloha protocol on the collision channel with n users assumes worst-case service rates (all user queues non-empty). Using this inner bound as a feasible set of achievable rates, a characterization of the throughput--fairness tradeoff over this set is obtained, where throughput is defined as the sum of the individual user rates, and two definitions of fairness are considered: the Jain-Chiu-Hawe function and the sum-user alpha-fair (isoelastic) utility function. This characterization is obtained using both an equality constraint and an inequality constraint on the throughput, and properties of the optimal controls, the optimal rates, and the fairness as a function of the target throughput are established. A key fact used in all theorems is the observation that all contention probability vectors that extremize the fairness functions take at most two non-zero values.