A novel capacity-aware SIC-based protocol for wireless networks

Abstract

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) enables a receiver to receive multiple frames concurrently, thereby improving the physical-layer (PHY) capacity significantly. However, a larger PHY capacity does not necessarily imply a larger MAC throughput. To solve this problem, we design a novel capacity-aware SIC-based MAC protocol. In the contention process of our MAC protocol, we adopt a new user-selection method to enable a maximum PHY capacity, while in the transmission process, we adopt a novel in-frame rate adaption mechanism to make full use of the PHY capacity. As a result, our protocol can achieve far higher throughput than conventional 802.11 networks. Extensive simulations verify the efficiency of our protocol.