A game theoretic approach for delay minimization in slotted ALOHA

This paper studies distributed choice of retransmission probabilities in slotted ALOHA. Both the cooperative team problem as well as the noncooperative game problem is considered. In previous work that has focused on the maximization of throughput, it was shown that in heavy load, this maximization is obtained at the cost of a huge delay of backlogged packets. This motivates us to investigate the delay minimization problem as well as the multicriterion problem of minimizing the average expected delay (or maximizing the throughput) subject to constraints on the expected delay of backlogged packets. A Markov chain analysis is used to obtain optimal and equilibrium retransmission probabilities and expected delays analysis.