Opportunistic multi-channel CSMA protocol for OFDMA systems

In this letter, we present an opportunistic multichannel CSMA protocol for OFDMA systems in frequency-selective fading channel. In order to opportunistically exploit the frequency selectivity, an OFDM-based single-channel CSMA protocol can employ water-filling power allocation as it allows a single station to utilize the whole frequency bandwidth at each time instant. In contrast, the proposed OFDMA-based multichannel CSMA protocol achieves the multi-user diversity gain by arranging multiple stations to transmit on their favorable sub-channels simultaneously. The proposed protocol is designed as an opportunistic version of the original multi-channel CSMA protocol, which was proposed in our previous work, and adopts a channel-adaptive backoff (or transmission probability control) algorithm, enabling each station to attempt data transmission on its high-SNR sub-channel with a high probability. The opportunistic multi-channel CSMA turns out to improve the total data rate significantly over the opportunistic single-channel CSMA, and to achieve almost full multi-user diversity gain despite the distributed operation.