  In this paper we investigate the effect of spatial coupling applied to the
recently-proposed coded slotted ALOHA (CSA) random access protocol. Thanks to
the bridge between the graphical model describing the iterative interference
cancelation process of CSA over the random access frame and the erasure
recovery process of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the binary
erasure channel (BEC), we propose an access protocol which is inspired by the
convolutional LDPC code construction. The proposed protocol exploits the
terminations of its graphical model to achieve the spatial coupling effect,
attaining performance close to the theoretical limits of CSA. As for the
convolutional LDPC code case, large iterative decoding thresholds are obtained
by simply increasing the density of the graph. We show that the threshold
saturation effect takes place by defining a suitable counterpart of the
maximum-a-posteriori decoding threshold of spatially-coupled LDPC code
ensembles. In the asymptotic setting, the proposed scheme allows sustaining a
traffic close to 1 [packets/slot].
