Use the slotted ALOHA model with one outstanding packet per active station and a collision channel: a slot with exactly one attempt succeeds, whereas an idle slot or a slot with two or more attempts delivers nothing. Let be independent Poisson random variables of mean , independent also of the transmission choices. Arrivals join after the current slot's attempts. Given , the attempt count has a binomial distribution with parameters and . Consequently, for ,
For , set and . The equation adds arrivals and removes precisely one packet following a successful slot. The estimate controls the common transmission probability and updates using the idle, success, or collision feedback. The conditional distribution of the next state depends only on , so this pair is a Markov chain.
Away from the reflecting floor in , its one-step conditional expectations are
When and are large with , the Poisson limit theorem gives and . Treating these approximate drifts as derivatives motivates the fluid approximation of slotted ALOHA:
The floor at is negligible in this interior scaling. This calculation motivates the ordinary differential equations; it is not a proof of a stochastic fluid limit.
For , put
Then and . On the domain , introduce time by . Differentiating gives
where .
The function is strictly increasing from zero to infinity, and . To check the monotonicity explicitly,
Indeed, with ,
because its discriminant is ; and . Thus the scalar ordinary differential equation for points toward the unique value satisfying . Every trajectory with , has bounded and . Positivity of follows from .
If , then and . Thus decays exponentially for large , and
This is finite-time draining of a fluid model. The unmodified equations have undefined at the origin, so the statement that trajectories converge to the origin needs this endpoint interpretation; continuing with an absorbing zero trajectory is an additional fluid-model convention, not a solution of the displayed equations at the origin.
If , then and . Now grows exponentially, physical time tends to infinity, and
In particular the trajectory escapes to infinity. Even without the ratio analysis, , since .
For the actual Markov chain, it is essential not to replace the finite- success probability by : a single backlogged packet can succeed with probability one. Instead, for , maximizing over gives the ALOHA throughput bound
If , choose and so that for all , uniformly in . For sufficiently small ,
because its derivative at zero is . Independence of arrivals and attempts gives
whenever . For any integer , stop at the stopping time . The stopped process is a nonnegative supermartingale. The optional stopping theorem, first at bounded times and then by a limit, yields the exponential-supermartingale escape bound
From every state with , a Poisson distribution arrival burst has a uniformly positive probability of sending the next backlog to at least , for any fixed . From there the probability of never revisiting is at least . By the Markov property at successive visits, the probability of infinitely many visits to this strip is zero: each visit has a uniform positive chance of being the last. This holds for every integer , so
Therefore the Markov chain is transient for every finite choice of . The proof is uniform in and does not infer stochastic transience merely from the approximate ordinary differential equations.
Random access network 2026-10-05
A random access network lets stations make transmission attempts independently using a shared medium. A collision can prevent all attempted packets from being delivered; slotted ALOHA adjusts attempt probabilities using slot feedback.