Queuing Performance of Multichannel S-ALOHA Systems With Correlated Arrivals

In this paper, we examine the queuing performance of terminals in a multichannel centralized S-ALOHA system with a finite terminal population and finite queue size in each terminal, employing a uniform backoff (UB) algorithm with retry limit for collision resolution. The performance evaluations focus on uplink traffic from web browsing, which is modeled as a Markov-modulated Bernoulli process with correlated arrivals. We analyze the system performance in terms of system throughput, mean queue length, mean delay, the probability that a packet is dropped by retry limit, the probability that a packet is blocked by a full queue, and the mean and variance of packet retransmission time, in relation to the source correlation, number of channels, window size, and retry limit. For comparison, we also consider bufferless terminals with correlated arrivals. In addition, we evaluate by simulations the performance of terminals with finite queue size when they have perfect knowledge of the backlog size. Results from our study allow the parameters of the UB algorithm to properly be chosen to meet the access-level quality-of-service requirements.