Interference Cancellation: Better Receivers for a New Wireless MAC.
Daniel Halperin, M. Josie Ammer, Thomas E. Anderson, David J. Wetherall · 2007
We argue that carrier sense in 802.11 and other wireless protocols leads to scheduling decisions that are overly pessimistic and hence waste capacity. As an alternative, we propose interference cancellation, in which simultaneous signals are modeled and decoded together rather than treating all but one as random noise. This method greatly expands the conditions under which overlapping transmissions can be successfully received, even by a single receiver. We demonstrate the practicality of these better receivers via a proof-of-concept experiment with USRP software radios. We argue that supporting concurrent transmissions enables new and more effective wireless MACs in which carrier sense is disabled. 1