ALOHA :

ALOHA net, also known as the ALOHA System, or simply ALOHA, was a pioneering computer networking system developed at the University of Hawaii. ALOHA net became operational in June, 1971, providing the first public demonstration of a wireless packet data network. The ALOHA net used a new method of medium access (ALOHA random access) and experimental UHF frequencies for its operation, since frequency assignments for communications to and from a computer were not available for commercial applications in the 1970s. But even before such frequencies were assigned there were two other media available for the application of an ALOHA channel cables and satellites. In the 1970s ALOHA random access was employed in the widely used Ethernet cable based network and then in the Marisat (now Inmarsat) satellite network. In the early 1980s frequencies for mobile networks became available, and in 1985 frequencies suitable for what became known as Wi-Fi were allocated in the US. These regulatory developments made it possible to use the ALOHA random access techniques in both Wi-Fi and in mobile telephone networks. ALOHA channels were used in a limited way in the 1980s in 1G mobile phones for signaling and control purposes. In the 1990s, Matti Makkonen and others at Telecom Finland greatly expanded the use of ALOHA channels in order to implement SMS message texting in 2G mobile phones. In the early 2000s additional ALOHA channels were added to 2.5G and 3G mobile phones with the widespread introduction of GPRS, using a slotted ALOHA random access channel combined with a version of the Reservation ALOHA scheme first analyzed by a group at BBN.

The ALOHA protocol:

Pure ALOHA:

The first version of the protocol (now called "Pure ALOHA", and the one implemented in ALOHAnet) was quite simple:

If you have data to send, send the data If the message collides with another transmission, try resending "later"

Note that the first step implies that Pure ALOHA does not check whether the channel is busy before transmitting. The critical aspect is the "later" concept: the quality of the backoff scheme chosen significantly influences the efficiency of the protocol, the ultimate channel capacity, and the predictability of its behavior. To assess Pure ALOHA, we need to predict its throughput, the rate of (successful) transmission of frames. First, let's make a few simplifying assumptions:

All frames have the same length. Stations cannot generate a frame while transmitting or trying to transmit. (That is, if a station keeps trying to send a frame, it cannot be allowed to generate more frames to send.) The population of stations attempts to transmit (both new frames and old frames that collided) according to a Poisson distribution.

Let "T" refer to the time needed to transmit one frame on the channel, and let's define "frametime" as a unit of time equal to T. Let "G" refer to the mean used in the Poisson distribution over transmission-attempt amounts: that is, on average, there are G transmission-attempts per frametime.

Overlapping frames in the pure ALOHA protocol. Frame-time is equal to 1 for all frames. Consider what needs to happen for a frame to be transmitted successfully. Let "t" refer to the time at which we want to send a frame. We want to use the channel for one frame-time beginning at t, and so we need all other stations to refrain from transmitting during this time. Moreover, we need the other stations to refrain from transmitting between t-T and t as well, because a frame sent during this interval would overlap with our frame. For any frame-time, the probability of there being k transmission-attempts during that frame-time is:

Comparison of Pure Aloha and Slotted Aloha shown on Throughput vs. Traffic Load plot. The average amount of transmission-attempts for 2 consecutive frame-times is 2G. Hence, for any pair of consecutive frame-times, the probability of there being k transmission-attempts during those two frame-times is:

Therefore, the probability ( ) of there being zero transmission-attempts between t-T and t+T (and thus of a successful transmission for us) is:

The throughput can be calculated as the rate of transmission-attempts multiplied by the probability of success, and so we can conclude that the throughput ( ) is:

The maximum throughput is 0.5/e frames per frame-time (reached when G = 0.5), which is approximately 0.184 frames per frame-time. This means that, in Pure ALOHA, only about 18.4% of the time is used for successful transmissions.
Slotted ALOHA:

An improvement to the original ALOHA protocol was "Slotted ALOHA", which introduced discrete timeslots and increased the maximum throughput. A station can send only at the beginning of a timeslot, and thus collisions are reduced. In this case, we only need to worry about the transmission-attempts within 1 frame-time and not 2 consecutive frame-times, since collisions can only occur during each timeslot. Thus, the probability of there being zero transmission-attempts in a single timeslot is:

The probability of k packets is:

The throughput is:

The maximum throughput is 1/e frames per frame-time (reached when G = 1), which is approximately 0.368 frames per frame-time, or 36.8%. Slotted ALOHA is used in low-data-rate tactical satellite communications networks by military forces, in subscriber-based satellite communications networks, mobile telephony call setup, and in the contactless RFID technologies.

TYPES OF ALOHA: RESERVATION ALOHA:

Reservation ALOHA, or R-ALOHA, is a channel access method for wireless (or other shared channel) transmission that allows uncoordinated users to share a common transmission resource. Reservation ALOHA (and its parent scheme, Slotted ALOHA) is a schema or rule set for the division of transmission resources over fixed time increments, also known as slots. If followed by all devices, this scheme allows the channel's users to cooperatively utilize a shared transmission resourcein this case, it is the allocation of transmission time. Reservation ALOHA is an effort to improve the efficiency of Slotted ALOHA. The improvements with Reservation ALOHA are markedly shorter delays and ability to efficiently support higher levels of utilization. As a contrast of efficiency, simulations have shown that Reservation ALOHA exhibits less delay at 80% utilization than Slotted ALOHA at 2036% utilization. The chief difference between Slotted and Reservation ALOHA is that with Slotted ALOHA, any slot is available for utilization without regards to prior usage. Under Reservation ALOHA's contention-based reservation schema, the slot is temporarily considered "owned" by the station that successfully used it. Additionally, Reservation ALOHA simply stops sending data once the station has completed its transmission. As a rule, idle slots are considered available to all stations that may then implicitly reserve (utilize) the slot on a contention basis. Some of the characteristics of Reservation Aloha are as follows #)Use ALOHA contention to reserve slots, TDMA for data transmission #)Here time axis isdivided into frames, and frames are divided in slots #)Some slots subdivided into reservation subslots #)In unreservedmode, each user with data sends a reservation request in one of reservation subslots #)Intended recipient sends ACK and slot assignment if reservation request does not suffer collision #)In reservedmode, one slot assigned to hold reserv. subslots, all other slots pre-reserved data txslots #)Node that has been granted slot sends its data in reserved slot #)Reservation exchanges heard by all nodes

#)Nodes know which slots are reserved and not to send data during these slots #)Flexible-TDMA #)Contention-based reservation exchanges confined to short reservation subslots #)Message slots shared among nodes with data to send in noninterferingmanner #)Design tradeoff of how many reservation slots and how many data slots #)Control distributed among all nodes in the network each receiving node grants reservations when txnode requests a slot

CONTROLLED ALOHA:
#) The notion of an optimal retransmission delay was introduced by Roberts. #) We extend the notion to include dynamic control of retransmission delay. #) A controlled Aloha system has the property that its terminals adjust their retransmission behavior as a function of perceived channel utilization. #) It will be shown that such adjustments are implementable in at least one way and that they improve system performance under heavy loads with the following example # )An example for Controlled ALOHA is as follows:

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SATELLITE BASED CONTROLLED ALOHA

#)A system and method for satellite based controlled ALOHA is provided. #)The system and method configure VSATs so that they accept guidance from a centralized and/or distributed system controller to determine when, where, and/or on what portion of a satellite resource to attempt to access a channel. #)The system and method take advantage of traffic patterns to maximize efficiency by utilizing a centralized and/or distributed control to determine which VSATs are and are not currently active, and to allocate to a portion of the inbound channel to the active VSATs and a portion of the inbound channel to the inactive VSATs.

#)In a distributed approach, each VSAT decides for itself whether it captures a certain part of the inbound resource or not. #)This decision can be made based on previous transmissions that went through the part of the inbound intended to be captured. #)Simple retransmission strategies are adopted to allow for the utilization of the ALOHA synchronous random access protocol. #)Numerical simulations were performed using a model representing the set of mobiles and the base station of a cell. #)The main propagation problems are progressively incorporated in the simulation, showing that the adaptive policy is always the best. #)Controlled ALOHA and a traditional protocol such as AMRT are compared, defining for each case the limiting rate below which the proposed system is preferable.

Finite population ALOHA:

#)The finite-population ALOHA system can be bistable : the system either is in low backlog or in high backlog. #)Every now and then it hops from high backlog to low backlog, but it is unlikely to be in intermediate states, as it will rapidly drift away from these states.

#)The graph above represents the Bistability area for a network with N =100 users without capture (orange) and with imperfect capture (green) (capture ratio z = 10) in mobile channels. #)The above figure gives the region for P0 and Pr where the network with 100 terminals is bistable. #)A conservative receiver threshold of 10 dB (z = 10) is considered, so these results may be somewhat pessimistic. #)The Bistability area for ALOHA without capture was computed first by Onozato and Noguchi. #)Areas mapping the stability of a slotted ALOHA network with capture were derived for the case that the population of terminals is divided into a group transmitting at high power and a group transmitting a low power. #)Van der Plas and Linnartz estimated the area of bistability by trial and error with the technique used to obtain drift curves. #)A uniform spatial distribution, shadowing (6 dB) and Rayleigh fading are considered. #)When receiver capture occurs, the mobile network exhibits bistability at substantially higher packet traffic loads, even for a pessimistic receiver threshold of 10 dB (z = 10). #)It appears that the network is always stable, irrespective of the retransmission probability Pr, if Pr < P0,max, with roughly P0,max = 2 . 10-3. #)This agrees with the observation by Ghez, Verdu and Schwartz, that for packet arrival rates < the limit of the capture probability for collisions with infinitely many signals the channel is stable if the probability of capture is independent from slot to slot. #)However, this may be a strong assumption if the retransmission waiting time is small. #)If packets are retransmitted from the same location, they are received with the same power, as the initial transmission attempt. #)If the same set of data packets collide again with the same powers for all signals involved, interference is likely to cause packet loss during all successive collisions.

EMAIL:
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages. An email message consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp. Originally a text-only (7-bit ASCII and others) communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it, but the history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a basic text message sent on the Internet today. Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself.