A ROBUST RANDOM MULTIPLE-ACCESS ALGORITHM FOR PACKET TRANSMISSIONS OVER NOISY CHANNELS WITH ERROR MEMORY

In this paper, a noisy slotted channel is considered. It is assumed th at channel feedback might be misinterpreted due to the existence of no ise on the channel. Furthermore, this disturbance is dependent on the channel state (either good or bad) which varies from slot to slot acco rding to a Markov chain. Consequently, the occurrence of the a channel feedback error is dependent on previous occurrences of errors (i.e., with error memory). Under this assumption, the throughput performance of a random multiple-access algorithm, called the Two-Cell algorithm, is analyzed and the results are compared with the throughputs of the C apetanakis tree-splitting algorithm operating over the same channels. It is shown that the Two-Cell algorithm retains positive throughputs f or all possible values of channel state parameters, and for all practi cal purposes, it outperforms the Capetanakis algorithm in terms of ins ensitivity to channel feedback errors.