Broadcast Coded Slotted ALOHA for Vehicular Communications: A Finite Frame Length Analysis

We propose an uncoordinated medium access control (MAC) protocol, called all-to-all broadcast coded slotted ALOHA (B-CSA) for reliable all-to-all broadcast in vehicular networks. Unlike unicast coded slotted ALOHA, in B-CSA each user acts as both transmitter and receiver in a half-duplex mode. The half-duplex mode gives rise to a double unequal error protection (DUEP) phenomenon: the more the user repeats its packet, the higher the probability that this packet is decoded by other users, but the lower the probability for this user to decode packets from others. We analyze the performance of B-CSA over the packet erasure channel for a finite frame length. In particular, we provide a general analysis of stopping sets for B-CSA and derive an analytical approximation of the performance in the error floor (EF) region, which captures the DUEP feature of B-CSA. Simulation results reveal that the proposed approximation predicts very well the performance of B-CSA in the EF region. Finally, we compare the proposed B-CSA protocol with carrier sense multiple access (CSMA), the current MAC mechanism in vehicular networks. The results show that B-CSA is able to support a much lager number of users than CSMA with the same reliability.