Achievable rates for intermittent multi-access communication

We formulate a model for intermittent multi-access communication for two users that captures the bursty transmission of the codeword symbols for each user and the possible asynchronism between the receiver and the transmitters as well as between the transmitters themselves. By making different assumptions for the intermittent process, we specialize the system to a random access system with or without collisions. For each model, we characterize the performance of the system in terms of achievable rate regions. The intermittency of the system comes with a significant cost in our achievable schemes.