Self-Adaptive Threshold ALOHA

Abstract

We propose Self-Adaptive Threshold ALOHA (SATA), a distributed random-access policy to minimize the Age of Information (AoI). SATA uses 1-bit broadcast feedback and requires no explicit coordination or message passing among nodes. {We show that this minimal feedback is sufficient for each node to perfectly track the number of active users and adjust its access probabilities accordingly.} For any initial network state, SATA converges to a collision-free TDMA steady state in finite time whenever the age threshold satisfies $\Gamma \ge n$, where $n$ is the network size. We derive closed-form expressions for the long-term average AoI and throughput in steady state, and establish that, for $\Gamma =n$, the expected transient duration scales as $O(n\log n)$. Simulation results confirm that SATA closely approaches TDMA performance across a wide range of network sizes, significantly outperforming Slotted ALOHA, Threshold ALOHA, and 1-persistent Threshold Slotted ALOHA. Notably, the performance gap between SATA and the benchmark random-access policies becomes more pronounced as network size grows.

5 pages, 3 figures