Tree/Stack Splitting with Remainder for Distributed Wireless Medium Access Control with Multipacket Reception

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the tree/stack splitting with remainder algorithm for distributed medium access control in a wireless network with multipacket reception. In order to reduce the length of a cycle and increase the network throughput, when the splitting with remainder algorithm is used, some nodes that attempt to transmit packets at the beginning of a cycle might have to postpone their packet retransmissions until the beginning of the next cycle. We demonstrate that the splitting with remainder algorithm outperforms the erasure algorithm and the probe algorithm. For the splitting with remainder algorithm, we analytically and accurately derive the network throughput and the average packet delay. We show that our analytical results are consistent with packet-based simulation results.