SPC12-6: Signal Processing Aided Opportunistic Decoding for Wireless Networks

In general, the instantaneous signal-to-interference- plus-noise ratio varies across a received frame. This variation is considerable in wireless systems in particular, due to the time- varying nature of wireless channels and interference. To exploit this variation, we divide the received frame into a number of constituent mini-frames, each mini-frame containing the received versions of every symbol in the frame. We select a subset of these mini-frames, combine them and attempt to decode the frame. If this attempt fails, we select another subset of the mini-frames and make another attempt. We continue the process until the frame is decoded without errors or all predetermined subsets have been exhausted. We implement the proposed protocol in a code division multiple access (CDMA) system. Our study shows that deploying our protocol in a CDMA system results in a significant reduction in the frame error rate (FER).