Joint collision resolution and transmit‐power adjustment for Aloha‐type random access

We consider uplink random access for which slotted Aloha has usually been employed with unknown channel conditions. Upon failure of a transmission attempt, a user cannot tell whether the failure was caused by collision with other simultaneously transmitting users or by his use of insufficient transmit power. If a transmission attempt failed due to collision which could have been resolved by retransmission, increasing transmit power would just waste power and, moreover, reduce the other users' chance of successful access. To handle this lack of information on the cause of failure, we propose a novel Cause‐of‐Failure resolution, where the transmit power is increased after a given number of consecutive unsuccessful access attempts when the probability that a given failure is caused by collision becomes sufficiently low. To exploit the thus‐obtained transmit power for the next random access attempt, we also determine the Cause‐of‐Success based on the number of consecutive successful attempts, i.e., whether to (probabilistically) decrease or maintain the current transmit power. This way, users can adjust their transmit power for random access, which we call Auto Power Fallback (APF), considered as an advanced version of the power ramping algorithm. We evaluate APF by modeling analysis and numerical computation based on the slotted Aloha, showing that APF determines a suitable transmit power for uplink random accesses while achieving good performance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.