Successive IC enabled by distributed rate control in an 802.11a ad hoc wireless network

For wireless networking analysis and simulations, receivers are typically assumed to be utilizing single-user decoding. Yet we know that we can take advantage of interference by enabling multi-user decoding. In the wireless networking community, the multi-user decoding technique of Interference Cancellation (IC) has been lately gaining interest due to its potential for significant throughput gains. In previous works we have shown gains in total throughput by leveraging optimal collaborative rate control to enable IC [1], and introduced a set of centralized and distributed algorithms to perform IC fast [2]. In those works though we presented numerical results and snapshot simulations respectively as proof-of-concept. Here, we integrate the fully distributed rate selection algorithm into a cross-layer protocol, which we implement in the open-source system level network simulator framework OMNeT++, for IEEE 802.11a. We conduct a thorough simulation study of the proposed protocol, and deliver results indicating significant total system throughput gains in a variety of scenarios with limited overhead.