A simple and versatile decentralized control for slotted ALOHA, reservation ALOHA, and local area networks

A simple, decentralized control for reducing the delays and stabilizing random-access channels is presented. The control, which is based on a computationally efficient recursive implementation of the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) predictor of the channel backlog, applies to slotted ALOHA, to reservation ALOHA, and to local area networks (LANs) with carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) or CSMA with collision detection (CSMA/CD) protocols. The MMSE predictor controller (MMSE-PC) can stabilize the slotted ALOHA for all traffic rates not exceeding e^-1, and it can achieve stable throughput arbitrarily close to one with finite delays in the reservation ALOHA and in LANs. Extensive simulation has shown that the MMSE-PC performs extremely well in all three random-access environments. For the implementation of the MMSE-PC in LANs, synchronization of transmissions is not required but it is required in slotted ALOHA and reservation ALOHA. The MMSE-PC has been implemented in hardware and tested in asynchronous LANs