
ALOHAnet Introduced Random Access Protocols to the Computing World - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-history/alohanet-introduced-random-access-protocols-to-the-computing-world
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meddlepal
Back in college I had networking course that the original professor was
replaced with a adjunct fill-in due to a sabbatical.

For some reason we spent what seemed like an unreasonably long time on ALOHA
and Slotted ALOHA... and I still don't really understand why we spent so much
time on ALOHA considering it was 2008. We even had to write an ALOHA simulator
at one point and the exam was 3/5 questions about ALOHA.

Not really sure where this story is going... but that's my experience with
ALOHA.

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csboyer
Aloha and slotted aloha are still fundamental to most wireless communication
networks. Most prevalent is today’s cellular networks.

An aloha like algorithm is used by your phone to initially bootstrap and
connect to the network, and to access network after long idle periods. This is
called the RACH procedure, which stands for random access channel. So our
phones very well perform this action multiple times a day.

5G networks might use an improvement on aloha called non-orthogonal multiple
access, but currently will still use the existing RACH design. Figuring out
how to pack more users into a random access channel has been a long open
research problem.

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alex_young
Alohanet inspired Bob Metcalfe to invent Ethernet, so it’s more than a little
interesting.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe)

