Collision recovery in distributed wireless networks with opportunistic cooperation

In this letter we focus on the problem of recovering information from collided packets in distributed wireless networks that are based on the IEEE 802.11 standard. We propose a cooperative protocol that employs the concept of physical layer network coding for this purpose. With the proposed protocol relay nodes opportunistically forward locally collided packets to the destinations. Subsequently, the destination nodes recover the desired packet by employing a detection algorithm that combines the directly-collided and forwarded-collided signals.