Multi-Round Contention in Wireless LANs with Multipacket Reception

Multi-packet reception (MPR) has been recognized as a powerful capacity-enhancement technique for random-access wireless local area networks (WLANs). As is common with all random access protocols, the wireless channel is often under-utilized in MPR WLANs. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-round contention random-access protocol to address this problem. This work complements the existing random-access methods that are based on single-round contention. In the proposed scheme, stations are given multiple chances to contend for the channel until there are a sufficient number of ``winning" stations that can share the MPR channel for data packet transmission. The key issue here is the identification of the optimal time to stop the contention process and start data transmission. The solution corresponds to finding a desired tradeoff between channel utilization and contention overhead. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous analysis to characterize the optimal strategy using the theory of optimal stopping. An interesting result is that the optimal stopping strategy is a simple threshold-based rule, which stops the contention process as soon as the total number of winning stations exceeds a certain threshold. Compared with the conventional single-round contention protocol, the multi-round contention scheme significantly enhances channel utilization when the MPR capability of the channel is small to medium. Meanwhile, the scheme automatically falls back to single-round contention when the MPR capability is very large, in which case the throughput penalty due to random access is already small even with single-round contention

Power-Optimal Feedback-Based Random Spectrum Access for an Energy Harvesting Cognitive User

In this paper, we study and analyze cognitive radio networks in which secondary users (SUs) are equipped with Energy Harvesting (EH) capability. We design a random spectrum sensing and access protocol for the SU that exploits the primary link's feedback and requires less average sensing time. Unlike previous works proposed earlier in literature, we do not assume perfect feedback. Instead, we take into account the more practical possibilities of overhearing unreliable feedback signals and accommodate spectrum sensing errors. Moreover, we assume an interference-based channel model where the receivers are equipped with multi-packet reception (MPR) capability. Furthermore, we perform power allocation at the SU with the objective of maximizing the secondary throughput under constraints that maintain certain quality-of-service (QoS) measures for the primary user (PU)

Maximum Throughput of a Cooperative Energy Harvesting Cognitive Radio User

In this paper, we investigate the maximum throughput of a saturated rechargeable secondary user (SU) sharing the spectrum with a primary user (PU). The SU harvests energy packets (tokens) from the environment with a certain harvesting rate. All transmitters are assumed to have data buffers to store the incoming data packets. In addition to its own traffic buffer, the SU has a buffer for storing the admitted primary packets for relaying; and a buffer for storing the energy tokens harvested from the environment. We propose a new cooperative cognitive relaying protocol that allows the SU to relay a fraction of the undelivered primary packets. We consider an interference channel model (or a multipacket reception (MPR) channel model), where concurrent transmissions can survive from interference with certain probability characterized by the complement of channel outages. The proposed protocol exploits the primary queue burstiness and receivers' MPR capability. In addition, it efficiently expends the secondary energy tokens under the objective of secondary throughput maximization. Our numerical results show the benefits of cooperation, receivers' MPR capability, and secondary energy queue arrival rate on the system performance from a network layer standpoint.Comment: Part of this paper was accepted for publication in PIMRC 201

Interference-Based Optimal Power-Efficient Access Scheme for Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, we propose a new optimization-based access strategy of multipacket reception (MPR) channel for multiple secondary users (SUs) accessing the primary user (PU) spectrum opportunistically. We devise an analytical model that realizes the multipacket access strategy of SUs that maximizes the throughput of individual backlogged SUs subject to queue stability of the PU. All the network receiving nodes have MPR capability. We aim at maximizing the throughput of the individual SUs such that the PU's queue is maintained stable. Moreover, we are interested in providing an energy-efficient cognitive scheme. Therefore, we include energy constraints on the PU and SU average transmitted energy to the optimization problem. Each SU accesses the medium with certain probability that depends on the PU's activity, i.e., active or inactive. The numerical results show the advantage in terms of SU throughput of the proposed scheme over the conventional access scheme, where the SUs access the channel randomly with fixed power when the PU is sensed to be idle

Throughput of a Cognitive Radio Network under Congestion Constraints: A Network-Level Study

In this paper we analyze a cognitive radio network with one primary and one secondary transmitter, in which the primary transmitter has bursty arrivals while the secondary node is assumed to be saturated (i.e. always has a packet waiting to be transmitted). The secondary node transmits in a cognitive way such that it does not impede the performance of the primary node. We assume that the receivers have multipacket reception (MPR) capabilities and that the secondary node can take advantage of the MPR capability by transmitting simultaneously with the primary under certain conditions. We obtain analytical expressions for the stationary distribution of the primary node queue and we also provide conditions for its stability. Finally, we provide expressions for the aggregate throughput of the network as well as for the throughput at the secondary node.Comment: Presented at CROWNCOM 201