Design and Analysis of Multichannel Slotted ALOHA for Machine-to-Machine Communication

In machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, a massive number of machine devices may transmit simultaneously in response to an event occurring in the system. Supporting massive device transmission while maintaining low congestion and low access delay is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a new transmission control scheme based on slotted ALOHA, with a practical consideration of partial information available at the data aggregator about the system. The proposed approximate maximum likelihood estimation ALOHA (AMLE-ALOHA) scheme incorporates an approximate ML estimation of the (unknown) number of active machines in the system. We apply the drift analysis to show the stability of the proposed control scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AMLE-ALOHA outperforms an existing scheme in terms of the access delay and reaction time under bursty traffic with the same partial information, and compares favorably to the optimal control scheme with oracle knowledge of the number of active machines in the system.