Beacon-Based Slotted ALOHA for Wireless Networks with Large Propagation Delay

In a wireless network with large propagation delay S-ALOHA(Slotted ALOHA) requires large guard time which causes lower normalized throughput. To reduce the large guard time in the ISA-ALOHA, a time alignment mechanism was proposed under the assumption of propagation delay estimation. In this letter, we propose a framed structure which is able to estimate propagation delay by employing coordinator beaconing. The framed structure consists of a time period for beaconing and a group of multiple time slots for random access. The proposed Beacon-based S-ALOHA(BS-ALOHA) can make packets generated during the time of beaconing evenly distributed over the random access period. Furthermore, we propose an analytical model considering overhead due to coordinator beaconing time and show that BS-ALOHA provides higher normalized throughput than both ALOHA and S-ALOHA employing the large guard time.