Relay-assisted multiple access with multi-packet reception capability and simultaneous transmission and reception

In this work we examine the operation of a node relaying packets from a number of users to a destination node. We assume multi-packet reception capabilities for the relay and the destination node and that the relay node can transmit and receive at the same time, so the problem of self interference arises. The relay does not have packets of its own and the traffic at the source nodes are assumed saturated. The relay node stores a source packet that it receives successfully in its queue when the transmission to the destination node has failed. We obtain analytical expressions for the characteristics of the relay's queue (such as arrival and service rate), the stability condition and the average length of the queue as functions of the probabilities of transmissions, the self interference coefficient and the outage probabilities of the links. We study the impact of the relay node and the self interference coefficient on the throughput per user-source as well as the aggregate throughput.