Collision-Tolerant Media Access Control with On-Off Accumulative Transmission

In this paper, a cross-layer collision-tolerant (CT) media access control (MAC) scheme is proposed for wireless networks. Unlike conventional MAC schemes that discard and retransmit signals colliding at a receiver, the CT-MAC extracts the salient information from the colliding signals with a new on-off accumulative transmission (OOAT) scheme in the physical layer. Users employing OOAT deliver information to the base station (BS) through uncoordinated on-off transmissions of multiple identical sub-symbols (accumulative transmission). Silence periods are inserted between sub-symbols inside a frame to reduce collision probability and render a special signal structure for physical layer detection. Algebraic properties of the on-off transmission patterns, which are represented as cyclic-shifted binary vectors, are analyzed, and the results provide guidelines on the design of OOAT systems and other systems that rely on cyclic-shifted binary vectors. Then, we demonstrate that the structure of the on-off transmission patterns enables a sub-optimum iterative detection method, which improves performance by iteratively exchanging extrinsic soft information between a forward and a backward soft interference cancellation (SIC). Both analytical and simulation results show that the new CT-MAC with OOAT scheme significantly outperforms many existing cross-layer MAC schemes in terms of the number of users supported and the normalized throughput.