Distributed Medium Access Control Protocol for Successive Interference Cancellation-Based Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) enables the successful reception of multiple concurrent transmissions and elimination of interference through successive decoding. However, previously proposed distributed medium access control protocols have not exploited SIC. They mostly focused on either interference avoidance, based on the assumption that a receiver can only decode one transmission at a time, or self-interference cancellation, where a node can be a receiver and a transmitter at the same time. In this letter, we propose the first distributed communication protocol for SIC-based wireless networks, based on a novel message exchange and decision mechanism, to enable the simultaneous transmission of multiple neighboring nodes around the transmitter and receiver. The message exchange allows a random subset of neighboring nodes to test the feasibility of their simultaneous transmission. The decision mechanism evaluates the successive decoding capability of SIC receivers with the additional activation of neighboring nodes. We demonstrate the throughput improvement of the proposed algorithm via extensive simulations.