Contention-based MAC protocols with erasure coding for wireless data networks

Contention-based medium access control (MAC) protocol is a key component for the success of wireless data networks. Conventional random access protocols like ALOHA and Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) suffer from packet collision which leads to low throughput. Aimed at improving the throughput performance, we propose to integrate erasure coding with contention-based MAC protocols for recovering collided packets. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, we focus on combining erasure coding with slotted ALOHA and slotted non-persistent CSMA in this paper. The performances of the resulting protocols are evaluated by both analytical model and simulation. Simulation results match very well with analytical results and show that the system throughput is increased for low to medium traffic loading. Packet loss ratio is also improved considerably with our scheme when the maximum number of packet retransmission times is limited. However, the delay for our scheme is higher due to the longer waiting time in our scheme for recovering collided packets. It is also shown that delay can be significantly reduced if we choose appropriate coding parameters though throughput will be sacrificed.