Optimal space-time packet scheduling for reservation ALOHA networks

This paper considers reservation ALOHA systems with space division multiple access (SDMA). Such systems dynamically assign time slots to accessing users. Due to SDMA, multiple users may occupy the same time slot and their relative spatial properties significantly affects the throughput of that slot and, hence the throughput of the system. This paper builds a model of the dependence of the system throughput on the co-slot assignment. The model directly suggests optimal packet scheduling that maximizes the system throughput. Since the optimization is exponentially complex, this paper also proposes and compares several greedy algorithms based on different heuristics.