NEAR OPTIMUM CONTROL OF MULTIPLE-ACCESS COLLISION CHANNELS

A method based on recursive computation of the expected number of attempts and successes during the collision resolution phase of an access control algorithm is introduced for the design of near-optimum control strategies for multiple access collision channels with ternary and binary feedback. With this approach it is possible to circumvent the extremely difficult and still unsolved problem of finding the access control algorithm which achieves the highest throughput by settling for a near-optimum solution. The key to the design of our algorithms is to approximate the originally infinite dimensional optimization problem by a one dimensional optimization problem. In the ternary feedback case, our proposed algorithm achieves a throughput virtually identical to the highest throughput reported today. Several forms of binary feedback are considered and algorithms are introduced that achieve the highest throughput reported today.