Analysis of the benefits of Superposition Coding in random wireless networks

Network-wide adoption of a multipacket transmission scheme such as Superposition Coding (SC) for local “one-to-many” communication results in mutually interfering “broadcast” clusters. We analyze the benefits of SC and traditional Frequency Division (FD) with this interference via a utility function that measures the rate of information transfer per unit area. In particular, we study transmitters forming a Poisson point process and using ALOHA for medium access. For a fixed bandwidth allocation, FD allows spatial reuse to be independently optimized for each frequency band. On the other hand, with SC for a fixed power allocation, the optimal spatial reuse depends on the relative contribution of each link to the utility function. Since optimal spatial reuse is a function of the network geometry, the gains provided by SC depend on the geometry of the receiver node placement.