Energy harvesting irregular repetition ALOHA with replica concatenation

In this paper, we consider an asynchronous random access scheme called irregular repetition ALOHA (IRA) as a generalization of contention resolution ALOHA (CRA) with varying repetitions. We present an asymptotic performance analysis of CRA and IRA on the collision channel for regular and irregular repetition rates. We also propose an improvement by merging the clean parts of packet replicas in partial collisions, and extend our analysis to this scenario as well. Specific designs of repetition distributions based on the new analysis show that the optimized solutions of irregular repetition slotted ALOHA (IRSA) perform well in both IRA and the enhanced scheme, and they considerably outperform the regular repetition distributions. We also introduce energy harvesting (EH) to both schemes as a practical and sustainable adaptation, where users are able to harvest energy and store it in their finite-capacity batteries. We model the battery state by a discrete-time Markov chain and derive an optimal transmission policy to maximize the asymptotic performance of the system. We provide comprehensive numerical results for both practical and asymptotic scenarios to verify the validity of the proposed analyses, and illustrate the benefits of the proposed systems.