Performance Analysis of Slotted Aloha with Multi-Access-Point Diversity

Slotted Aloha is an effective random access protocol and can also be an important element of more advanced media access protocols. This paper investigates slotted Aloha in a radio environment with multiple access points. Specifically, we examine the impact of multi-access-point (multi-AP) diversity on the performance of slotted Aloha. The paper considers both omnidirectional (OM) and beamforming (BF) antennas at transmission nodes. This leads to the investigation and comparison of four different network scenarios, i.e., OM with multi-AP diversity, OM without multi-AP diversity, BF with multi-AP diversity and BF without multi-AP diversity. Performance evaluations and comparisons are presented in terms of throughput.