Performance of successive interference cancellation technique in IEEE 802.11 based WLANs

In this paper, we study the performance of successive interference cancellation (SIC) technique for random access based wireless local area networks (WLANs). We consider an IEEE 802.11 based carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access control (MAC) protocol for MAC layer and a SIC technique at the physical layer. Via extensive simulation campaign, we investigate the throughput gain provided by the SIC technique in WLANs. We show that the throughput gain given by the SIC technique in WLANs is not high as in cellular and mesh networks. However, the throughput gain is not negligible at a default configuration of WLANs. We also investigate that the throughput gain due to the SIC technique depends on the MAC and physical layer parameters. We show that the throughput gain for SIC technique: (i) does not change significantly for increasing the transmit power of the nodes, (ii) decreases rapidly with increasing the minimum contention window (CW) of the nodes which is a parameter of CSMA/CA MAC protocol and is not significant at the optimal value of the minimum CW, (iii) increases with increasing the path loss exponent of wireless medium, and (iv) decreases with increasing the value of the required signal to interference plus noise ratio for successful packet reception.