Design and Analysis of an Energy-Efficient CSMA Protocol for Asynchronous Multiple-Packet Reception

This paper proposes a carrier-sensing multiple access protocol for asynchronous multiple-packet reception (MPR), which enables wireless receivers to correctly decode partially time-overlapping packets. Unlike previous studies, which require back-off nodes to constantly monitor the channel, our design requires only that each node sense the number of transmitting nodes after the completion of the back-off period for determining whether to begin transmission in the next time slot. In addition, we develop an analytical model to evaluate relevant parameters and performance metrics of the proposed protocol. Our model relies on the channel-sensing probability of a node in a randomly chosen slot, rather than channel-accessing probability adopted in previous models for asynchronous MPR. The results are validated through numerical study under a variety of network conditions. We also show that the proposed protocol is quite robust to imperfect estimation in channel sensing, and is more energy-efficient than other similar threshold-based protocols.