CSMA k-SIC — A class of distributed MAC protocols and their performance evaluation

The CSMA/CA protocol is based on the “Interference as Noise” (IAN) paradigm i.e. it always gets rid of strong interference near a receiver to ensure quality of reception. However, it is well known from Multi-user Information Theory that treating Interference as Noise is not optimal. This paper proposes a class of protocols that employ the Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) technique in a systematic fashion to move beyond always treating interference as noise. Such protocols allow one to pack more links than the classical CSMA. We describe the protocols along with their signaling mechanism to implement them in a distributed fashion. We then perform Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the performance and show significant gains over the IAN based CSMA/CA protocol in large random networks.