A medium access protocol exploiting multiuser-detection in CDMA ad-hoc networks

Abstract

A new medium access protocol which exploits the physical layer capability of multiuser detection is proposed to help in improving the throughput/delay performance of ad-hoc networks. When more than one node has packets buffered for a common node in the neighborhood, all such nodes can simultaneously transmit their packets to the common receiver after reserving their surrounding channel. This is achieved in our protocol by extending the (sender-initiated) CSMA/CA collision avoidance framework by the receiver-initiated medium access technique and incorporating the transmission power control. We analyze the improvement in the throughput that can be achieved over the basic sender-initiated collision avoidance protocol in the network. Since the throughput improvement via multi-packet reception is influenced by the network layer activity as well, the performance of our protocol rolls back to that of the basic sender-initiated protocol in case of no coordination from the network layer. For the evaluation of performance of our protocol we simulate ad-hoc networks for different network topologies and traffic configurations. We observe the scheme to be capable in significantly improving the throughput/delay performance of the network.