ALOHAnet

Soulimane MAMMAR

February 25, 2021

1 Introduction
ALOHAnet, also known as the ALOHA System, or simply ALOHA, was de-
veloped at the University of Hawaii under the leadership of Norman Abram-
son along with Thomas Gaarder, Franklin Kuo, Shu Lin, Wesley Peterson
and Edward Weldon. The goal was to use low-cost commercial radio equip-
ment to connect users on Oahu and the other Hawaiian islands with a central
time-sharing computer on the main Oahu campus. The first packet broad-
casting unit went into operation in June 1971 providing the first public
demonstration of a wireless packet data network. Terminals were connected
to a special purpose ”terminal connection unit” using RS-232 at 9600 bit/s.
ALOHA originally stood for Additive Links On-line Hawaii Area.
The original version of ALOHA used two distinct frequencies in a hub
configuration, with the hub machine broadcasting packets to everyone on the
”outbound” channel, and the various client machines sending data packets
to the hub on the ”inbound” channel. If data was received correctly at the
hub, a short acknowledgment packet was sent to the client; if an acknowledg-
ment was not received by a client machine after a short wait time, it would
automatically retransmit the data packet after waiting a randomly selected
time interval. This acknowledgment mechanism was used to detect and cor-
rect for ”collisions” created when two client machines both attempted to
send a packet at the same time.
In the early 1980s frequencies for mobile networks became available,
and in 1985 frequencies suitable for what became known as Wi-Fi were
allocated in the US. These regulatory developments made it possible to
use the ALOHA random-access techniques in both Wi-Fi and in mobile
telephone networks.
ALOHA channels were used in a limited way in the 1980s in 1G mobile
phones for signaling and control purposes. In the late 1980s, the Euro-
pean standardisation group GSM who worked on the Pan-European Digital
mobile communication system GSM greatly expanded the use of ALOHA
channels for access to radio channels in mobile telephony. In the early 2000s
additional ALOHA channels were added to 2.5G and 3G mobile phones.

1
 ALOHAnet’s primary importance was its use of a shared medium for
client transmissions. This solution became known as a pure ALOHA, or
random-access channel, and was the basis for subsequent Ethernet develop-
ment and later Wi-Fi networks. Various versions of the ALOHA protocol
(such as Slotted ALOHA) also appeared later in satellite communications,
and were used in wireless data networks such as ARDIS, Mobitex, CDPD,
and GSM.

2 ALOHA Protocol
2.1 Pure ALOHA
In pure ALOHA, the time of transmission is continuous.

• Whenever a station has an available frame, it sends the frame.

• There will be collisions, of course, and the colliding frames will be

damaged. Senders need some way to find out if this is the case.

– In some ALOHA systems, after each station has sent its frame
to the central computer, this computer rebroadcasts the frame
to all of the stations. A sending station can thus listen for the
broadcast from the hub to see if its frame has gotten through.
– In other systems, the sender might be able to listen for collisions
while transmitting (such as wired LANs).
– In another category of systems, the receiver sends an acknowl-
edgment upon the receipt of a frame

Note that the first step implies that Pure ALOHA does not check whether
the channel is busy before transmitting. Since collisions can occur and data
may have to be sent again, ALOHA cannot use 100% of the capacity of the
communications channel.
If the frame was destroyed, the sender just waits a random amount of
time and sends it again. The waiting time must be random or the same
frames will collide over and over, in lockstep. Systems in which multiple
users share a common channel in a way that can lead to conflicts are known
as contention systems.
A sketch of frame generation in an ALOHA system is given in Figure 1.
Frames have all the same length because the throughput of ALOHA sys-
tems is maximized by having a uniform frame size rather than by allowing
variable-length frames.
Whenever two frames try to occupy the channel at the same time, there
will be a collision (as seen in Figure 1) and both will be garbled.
An interesting question is: what is the efficiency of an ALOHA channel?
In other words, what fraction of all transmitted frames escape collisions

2
Figure 1: In pure ALOHA, frames are transmitted at completely arbitrary
times.

under these chaotic circumstances? Let us first consider an infinite collection

of users typing at their terminals (stations). A user is always in one of two
states: typing or waiting. Initially, all users are in the typing state. When
a line is finished, the user stops typing, waiting for a response. The station
then transmits a frame containing the line over the shared channel to the
central computer and checks the channel to see if it was successful. If so,
the user sees the reply and goes back to typing. If not, the user continues to
wait while the station retransmits the frame over and over until it has been
successfully sent.
Let the ”frame time” denote the amount of time needed to transmit the
standard, fixed-length frame (i.e., the frame length divided by the bit rate).
At this point, we assume that the new frames generated by the stations are
well modeled by a Poisson distribution with a mean of N frames per frame
time. (The infinite-population assumption is needed to ensure that N does
not decrease as users become blocked.) If N > 1, the user community is
generating frames at a higher rate than the channel can handle, and nearly
every frame will suffer a collision. For reasonable throughput, we would
expect 0 < N < 1.
In addition to the new frames, the stations also generate retransmissions
of frames that previously suffered collisions. Let us further assume that the
old and new frames combined are well modeled by a Poisson distribution,
with mean of G frames per frame time. Clearly, G ≥ N . At low load (i.e.,
N ≈ 0), there will be few collisions, hence few retransmissions, so G ≈ N .
At high load, there will be many collisions, so G > N . Under all loads,
the throughput, S, is just the offered load, G, times the probability, P0 , of
a transmission succeeding—that is, S = GP0 , where P0 is the probability

3
that a frame does not suffer a collision.
A frame will not suffer a collision if no other frames are sent within one
frame time of its start, as shown in Figure 2. Under what conditions will
the shaded frame arrive undamaged? Let t be the time required to send
one frame. If any other user has generated a frame between time t0 and
t0 + t, the end of that frame will collide with the beginning of the shaded
one. In fact, the shaded frame’s fate was already sealed even before the
first bit was sent, but since in pure ALOHA a station does not listen to the
channel before transmitting, it has no way of knowing that another frame
was already underway. Similarly, any other frame started between t0 + t
andt0 + 2t will bump into the end of the shaded frame.

Figure 2: Vulnerable period for the shaded frame.

The probability that k frames are generated during a given frame time,
in which G frames are expected, is given by the Poisson distribution
Gk e−G
P r[k] =
k!
so the probability of zero frames is just e−G . In an interval two frame times
long, the mean number of frames generated is 2G. The probability of no
frames being initiated during the entire vulnerable period is thus given by
P0 = e−2G . Using S = GP0 , we get
S = Ge−2G
The relation between the offered traffic and the throughput is shown in
Figure 3. The maximum throughput occurs at G = 0.5, with S = 1/2e,
which is about 0.184. In other words, the best we can hope for is a channel
utilization of 18%. This result is not very encouraging, but with everyone
transmitting at will, we could hardly have expected a 100% success rate.

4
 Figure 3: Throughput versus offered traffic for ALOHA systems.

2.2 Slotted ALOHA

Soon after ALOHA came onto the scene, Roberts (1972) published a method
for doubling the capacity of an ALOHA system. His proposal was to divide
time into discrete intervals called slots, each interval corresponding to one
frame. This approach requires the users to agree on slot boundaries. One
way to achieve synchronization would be to have one special station emit a
pip at the start of each interval, like a clock.
In Roberts’ method, which has come to be known as slotted ALOHA—in
contrast to Abramson’s pure ALOHA—a station is not permitted to send
whenever the user types a line. Instead, it is required to wait for the be-
ginning of the next slot. Thus, the continuous time ALOHA is turned into
a discrete time one. This halves the vulnerable period. The probability of
no other traffic during the same slot as our test frame is then e−G , which
leads to
S = Ge−G
As you can see from Figure 3, slotted ALOHA peaks at G = 1, with a
throughput of S = 1/e or about 0.368, twice that of pure ALOHA. If the
system is operating at G = 1, the probability of an empty slot is 0.368 .
The best we can hope for using slotted ALOHA is 37% of the slots empty,
37% successes, and 26% collisions. Operating at higher values of G reduces
the number of empties but increases the number of collisions exponentially.
To see how this rapid growth of collisions with G comes about, consider the
transmission of a test frame. The probability that it will avoid a collision
is e−G , which is the probability that all the other stations are silent in that
slot. The probability of a collision is then just 1 − e−G . The probability of a
transmission requiring exactly k attempts (i.e., k − 1 collisions followed by
one success) is
Pk = e−G (1 − e−G )k−1

5
The expected number of transmissions, E, per line typed at a terminal is
then
X∞ X∞
E= kPk = ke−G (1 − e−G )k−1 = eG
k=1 k=1

As a result of the exponential dependence of E upon G, small increases in

the channel load can drastically reduce its performance.