Asynchronous Cooperative Aloha for Multi-Receiver Satellite Communication Networks

Satellite communication networks suffer from heterogeneous and varying propagation delay, which makes slotted random access (RA) protocols being no longer favorable, especially in the multi-receiver scenario. Different from other train of thoughts for RA algorithms, an asynchronous RA scheme named asynchronous cooperative Aloha (ACA) is introduced to benefit from the heterogeneous and varying propagation delay in satellite communication networks. A specific packet is transmitted only once with the concept of spatial diversity, and multiple receivers are used to receive the packets. Cooperative interference cancellation technique combined with sliding correlation scheme is adopted to efficiently resolve packet collisions at the gateway. The performance of ACA scheme is evaluated via mathematical analysis and simulations. Simulation results show that ACA outperforms the conventional asynchronous RA scheme in terms of throughput and packet loss ratio.