Cooperative Retransmissions Through Collisions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that cooperative retransmissions using interference-embracing techniques like ANC can significantly improve throughput in wireless networks by enabling simultaneous retransmissions of lost packets without extra overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a practical approach for cooperative retransmissions in interfering wireless links using opportunistic listening and ANC, enhancing throughput over traditional ARQ.

Findings

Higher retransmission throughput achieved

Simultaneous retransmissions without extra overhead

Superior performance demonstrated through simulations

Abstract

Interference in wireless networks is one of the key capacity-limiting factors. Recently developed interference-embracing techniques show promising performance on turning collisions into useful transmissions. However, the interference-embracing techniques are hard to apply in practical applications due to their strict requirements. In this paper, we consider utilising the interference-embracing techniques in a common scenario of two interfering sender-receiver pairs. By employing opportunistic listening and analog network coding (ANC), we show that compared to traditional ARQ retransmission, a higher retransmission throughput can be achieved by allowing two interfering senders to cooperatively retransmit selected lost packets at the same time. This simultaneous retransmission is facilitated by a simple handshaking procedure without introducing additional overhead. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed cooperative retransmission.