"Sensitivity and Coding of Oppertunistic ALOHA in Sensor Networks with Mobile Access" P. Venkitasubramaniam, S. Adireddy and L. Tong IEEE Journal for VLSI Signal Processing, Vol. 41, Issue 3, pp. 329-344, Nov. 2004.
We consider a distributed medium access protocol, Opportunistic ALOHA, for reachback in sensor networks with mobile access points (AP). We briefly discuss some properties of the protocol, like throughput and transmission control for an orthogonal CDMA physical layer.We then consider the incorporation of necessary side information like location into the transmission control and numerically demonstrate the loss in throughput in the absence of such information. Through simulations, we discuss the robustness and sensitivity of the protocol under various modeling errors and propose strategies to allowfor errors in estimation of some parameterswithout reduction in the throughput. For networks, where the sensors are allowed to collaborate, we consider three coding schemes for reliable transmission: spreading code independent, spreading code dependent transmission and coding across sensors.
These schemes are compared in terms of achievable rates and random coding error exponents. The coding across sensors scheme has comparable achievable rates to the spreading code dependent scheme, but requires the additional transmission of sensor ID. However, the scheme does not require the mobile AP to send data through the beacon unlike the other two schemes. The use of these coding schemes to overcome sensitivity is demonstrated through simulations.