On calculating high throughputs in multi-hop slotted ALOHA packet radio networks

An investigation is conducted of the problem of determining routing assignments in slotted Aloha packet radio networks to maximize the end-to-end throughput. It is assumed that the networks have an arbitrary topology and that the relative traffic requirements matrix is arbitrary. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear programming problem. Unfortunately, the problem is not a convex program, which explains why the development of an algorithm to find global optimal solutions has been so elusive. A heuristic algorithm is developed based upon ideas from resource directive decomposition. The heuristic is applied to several standard problems. The numerical results show that the method compares favorably to other methods in the literature