Spread slotted ALOHA techniques for personal satellite communications: performance analysis

The authors study spread slotted ALOHA (SSA) techniques which combine certain characteristics of both spread spectrum and slotted ALOHA (SA) systems to achieve better performance than the constituent systems. Their results demonstrate that SSA offers significant improvements in terms of throughput, delay and network stability against excessive loading at very acceptable levels of receiver implementation complexities. Also, SSA is found to be highly robust to errors in the time of arrivals (a serious and frequently encountered problem in satellite networks) and eliminates the need to allocate guard time. Some of the candidate SSA schemes studied show great promise for practical implementation both from the performance and complexity points of view