[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.