SICTA: a 0.693 contention tree algorithm using successive interference cancellation

Contention tree algorithms have provable stability properties, and are known to achieve stable throughput as high as 0.487 for the infinite population Poisson model. A common feature in all these random access protocols is that collided packets at the receive-node are always discarded. In this paper, we derive a novel tree algorithm (TA) that we naturally term SICTA because it relies on successive interference cancellation to resolve collided packets. Performance metrics including throughput and delay are analyzed to establish that SICTA outperforms existing contention tree algorithms reaching 0.693 in stable throughput.