Collision Resolution by Exploiting Symbol Misalignment

Abstract: This paper presents CRESM, a novel collision resolution method for decoding collided packets in random-access wireless networks. In a collision, overlapping signals from several sources are received simultaneously at a receiver. CRESM exploits symbol misalignment among the overlapping signals to recover the individual packets. CRESM can be adopted in 802.11 networks without modification of the transmitter design; only a simple DSP technique is needed at the receiver to decode the overlapping signals. Our simulations indicate that CRESM has better BER performance than the simplistic Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) technique that treats interference as noise, for almost all SNR regimes. The implication of CRESM for random-access networking is significant: in general, using CRESM to resolve collisions of up to n packets, network throughput can be boosted by more than n times if the transmitters are allowed to transmit more aggressively in the MAC protocol.