Exploiting Multiuser Diversity with Capture in Wireless Communication Networks

Multiuser diversity refers to the inherent diversity in channel quality across several mobile users in a wireless communication network. Multiuser diversity can be exploited through rate adaptation to increase system goodput, however the overhead incurred in polling channel state information in large networks can overshadow the multiuser diversity gain. In this paper, we propose a novel wireless medium access control protocol, multiuser diversity with capture (MDC), that uses the capture effect to avoid the large overhead incurred in polling channel state information. We simulate the goodput performance of MDC and compare it with the medium access diversity (MAD) scheme in the literature. Our results show that the proposed MDC outperforms MAD when the number of mobile stations in the network is reasonably large.