Optimum Header Positioning in Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) based Aloha

Abstract: Random Access MAC protocols are simple and effective when the nature of the traffic is unpredictable and sporadic. In the following paper, investigations on the new Enhanced Contention Resolution ALOHA (ECRA) are presented, where some new aspects of the protocol are investigated. Mathematical derivation and numerical evaluation of the symbol interference probability after SIC are here provided. Results of the optimum header positioning which is found to be in the beginning and in the end of the packets, are exploited for the evaluation of ECRA throughput and Packet Error Rate (PER) under imperfect knowledge of packets positions. Remarkable gains in the maximum throughput are observed for ECRA w.r.t. Contention Resolution ALOHA (CRA) under this assumption.