Error Reduction in Multiple-Access Systems by Message Wrapping

In wireless multiple-access systems, CSMA/CA cannot eliminate packet collision completely, especially in the presence of hidden terminals. To address the problem, ZigZag decoding was proposed to resolve collisions. In this paper, we characterise the probability of decoding failure (due to rank deficiency) for a given transmission overhead. We then propose a new technique called message wrapping to further reduce the probability of decoding error. Our analytical and numerical results both show that errors can be significantly reduced by message wrapping.