On the performance of successive interference cancellation in random access networks

Abstract

Abstract-Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) is a physical-layer technique that enables reception of multiple overlapping transmissions. While SIC has the potential to boost the network throughput, if the MAC protocol employed in the network is agnostic to such a capability at the physical-layer, the full potential of SIC can not be utilized in the network. There have been a number of studies to design new SIC-aware MAC protocols or adjust the existing protocols to exploit SIC. Despite that, the exact effect of MAC protocols on the throughput of SIC-enabled networks is unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel SIC-aware MAC protocol based on the disparity of user channels in a wireless network and analyze its performance. We consider a simple random access protocol with no SIC as the base configuration and compare it with three other configurations with different levels of SIC-awareness. We show that while a SICenabled physical layer without a SIC-aware MAC protocol can increase the throughput of the network by 1.5x, a specifically designed MAC protocol is far more efficient achieving up to 3.3x improvement in throughput. Our SIC-aware MAC protocol is fully distributed and hence subject to selfish behavior of users. Thus, we also consider the case where the users behave selfishly. We model our proposed protocol as a one-shot simultaneous move game and derive a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. We also show that we can set the cost of packet transmission in such a way that we get the optimal system throughput at the Nash equilibrium.

CSNOMA: Carrier Sense Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access

“…The characteristics of scheduling schemes utilizing IC are investigated in [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 ]. However, they consider the low dense network, so the performance gain is not properly investigated as increasing the nodes in the network.…”

Revisiting of Channel Access Mechanisms in Mobile Wireless Networks through Exploiting Physical Layer Technologies

“…The idea of SIC has also been employed in [31][32][33] to improve the network performance through Aloha-based random access, where the transmissions are divided into time slots, and each client randomly selects one slot for its Figure 11: A simple example when SIC is applied in WLAN. The three clients transmit their data packets to the AP simultaneously.…”

Random Access over Wireless Links: Optimal Rate and Activity Probability Selection

“…To handle this problem, there have been extensive efforts, which focus on collision recovery in random access. Towards this goal, [5] investigates network throughput performance by using the capture effect, [6] presents a detailed capture effect analysis with wireless channel considerations, and [7] investigates performance of successive interference cancellation (SIC) in random access networks. As a further example, we also note that multiple replicas of the packets can also be transmitted coupled with suitable iterative decoding algorithms at the receiver side, e.g., through contention resolution diversity slotted ALOHA [8] and irregular repetition slotted ALOHA [9] to increase the system throughput.…”