Throughput and Delay Performance of Slotted Aloha in SmartBANs under Saturation Conditions

This letter evaluates the performance of the slotted Aloha protocol defined by the European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) SmartBAN specification, under saturation conditions. For this purpose, we develop a two-dimensional Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) to model the operational details of the protocol and assess its performance in terms of saturation throughput and average end-to-end delay. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated by means of simulation which reveals a very good match among theoretical and simulation results. The model can be used for protocol performance prediction and optimization purposes.