Maximum stable throughput of FS-ALOHA under delay constraints

This paper studies the maximum stable throughput of FS-ALOHA, a random access algorithm for dynamic bandwidth reservation in access networks, subject to delay constraints. Requests that are not transmitted successfully before the maximum delay t max expires are dropped. We state that the algorithm is stable for a certain input rate λ, if the dropping probability is below a predefined tolerance e, e.g., e=10 −9 . The matrix analytic method (MAM) is used to determine the maximum input rate for which the system is stable. Numerical examples for different parameter setting provide a useful insight on how to optimize the maximum stable throughput as a function of t max , the maximum delay, and e, the drop tolerance.