Contentious Feedback in Cellular Systems

We consider the problem of counting mobile stations based on feedback they provide. For this problem we propose an anonymous contentious feedback mechanism which permits efficient counting and relate the resulting estimation problem to a well know combinatorial problem of "coupon collection." Using this relationship, we analyze the estimation problem in an idealized setting. We find the ML estimator and demonstrate that it is inappropriate in this setting. We then propose an estimator which is shown to achieve good performance over a large range of parameters.