On the Throughput of Wireless Sensor Networks Using Multi-Packet Reception

In wireless sensor networks, the nodes near the sink suffer from heavy traffic load. The recent progresses in physical layer make multi-packet reception (MPR) feasible, which may alleviate the suffering nodes. In this paper, we utilize MPR to improve the throughput of wireless sensor networks while maintain the fairness requirement for each sensor. Firstly, we formulate an optimization problem for wireless sensor networks using MPR. The result of the optimization is an upper bound for the network throughput. Secondly, we give a feasible heuristic scheme. In the performance evaluation, we analyse the throughput gap between the upper bound and the performance of the heuristic scheme. We also study the performance of the heuristic scheme by adjusting several network parameters and the results show that MPR brings notable throughput gain in wireless sensor networks and give some network design implications.