Multichannel ALOHA with Exploration Phase

Abstract: In this paper, we consider exploration for multichannel ALOHA by transmitting preambles before transmitting data packets and show that the maximum throughput can be improved by a factor of 2 - exp(-1) = 1.632, which can be seen as the gain of exploration. In the proposed approach, a base station (BS) needs to send the feedback information to active users to inform the numbers of transmitted preambles in multiple channels, which can be reliably estimated as in compressive random access. Simulation results also confirm the results from analysis.