An iterative ZigZag decoding for combating collisions in wireless networks

Business and entertainment increasingly depend on WLANs, as they provide flexibility of locations and low maintenance efforts. However in the presence of hidden terminals sender-receiver pairs experience severe packet loss due to collisions. ZigZag decoding has been proposed as an effective technique for recovering collided packets, but it may cause error propagation. In this paper, we propose an iterative ZigZag decoding algorithm to mitigate error propagation and further improve the system performance in the presence of collisions. Simulation results show that the proposed iterative ZigZag decoding can effectively overcome error propagation and considerably improve the system performance.