Ph.D. student Jian Tan has won the Best Student Paper Award at the 20th International Teletraffic Congress for the paper: "Is ALOHA Causing Power Law Delays?", joint work with his adviser Prof. P.R. Jelenkovic.
Short description:
ALOHA is one of the first and most basic distributed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that represents a basis for many modern MAC protocols, e.g., Carrier Sense Multiple Access. We discover a new phenomenon showing that a basic finite population ALOHA model with variable size (exponential) packets results in power law transmission delays and possibly even in zero throughput.