  Recently, contention resolution diversity slotted ALOHA (CRDSA) has been
introduced as a simple but effective improvement to slotted ALOHA. It relies on
MAC burst repetitions and on interference cancellation to increase the
normalized throughput of a classic slotted ALOHA access scheme. CRDSA allows
achieving a larger throughput than slotted ALOHA, at the price of an increased
average transmitted power. A way to trade-off the increment of the average
transmitted power and the improvement of the throughput is presented in this
paper. Specifically, it is proposed to divide each MAC burst in k sub-bursts,
and to encode them via a (n,k) erasure correcting code. The n encoded
sub-bursts are transmitted over the MAC channel, according to specific
time/frequency-hopping patterns. Whenever n-e>=k sub-bursts (of the same burst)
are received without collisions, erasure decoding allows recovering the
remaining e sub-bursts (which were lost due to collisions). An interference
cancellation process can then take place, removing in e slots the interference
caused by the e recovered sub-bursts, possibly allowing the correct decoding of
sub-bursts related to other bursts. The process is thus iterated as for the
CRDSA case.
