Carrier Sensing-Based Medium Access Control Protocol for WLANs Exploiting Successive Interference Cancellation

In this paper, we propose a carrier sensing-based medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs) for exploiting successive interference cancellation (SIC). We then develop an analytical model to compute the total throughput of a WLAN under the proposed MAC protocol in the presence of path loss, Rayleigh fading, and log-normal shadowing and validate the model via simulation. By means of the analytical model and simulation results, we compare the performance of a carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) MAC protocol and the proposed MAC protocol in utilizing the opportunities from SIC. We find that the proposed MAC protocol effectively utilizes the opportunities of SIC and significantly improves throughput compared with the CSMA MAC protocol. We also investigate the effect of some of the parameters of network and wireless channel on the performance of SIC.