Error Performance of Channel Coding in Random-Access Communication

A new channel coding approach was proposed by Luo and Ephremides for random multiple-access communication over the discrete-time memoryless channel. The coding approach allows users to choose their communication rates independently without sharing the rate information among each other or with the receiver. The receiver will either decode the messages or report a collision depending on whether reliable message recovery is possible. It was shown that, asymptotically as the codeword length goes to infinity, the set of communication rates supporting reliable message recovery can be characterized by an achievable region which equals Shannon's information rate region without a convex hull operation. In this paper, we derive achievable bounds on error probabilities, including the decoding error probability and the collision miss detection probability, of random multiple-access systems with a finite codeword length. Achievable error exponents are obtained by taking the codeword length to infinity.