Detection and Combining Techniques for Asynchronous Random Access with Time Diversity

TL;DR

This paper explores advanced detection and combining techniques for asynchronous random access protocols, demonstrating improved spectral efficiency through interference-aware correlation and successive interference cancellation.

Contribution

It introduces a two-phase detection and association method enabling effective packet combining in asynchronous RA, enhancing performance over existing schemes.

Findings

Interference-aware soft-correlation improves packet detection accuracy.

The proposed approach increases spectral efficiency.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the techniques.

Abstract

Asynchronous random access (RA) protocols are particularly attractive for their simplicity and avoidance of tight synchronization requirements. Recent enhancements have shown that the use of successive interference cancellation (SIC) can largely boost the performance of these schemes. A further step forward in the performance can be attained when diversity combining techniques are applied. In order to enable combining, the detection and association of the packets to their transmitters has to be done prior to decoding. We present a solution to this problem, that articulates into two phases. Non-coherent soft-correlation as well as interference-aware soft-correlation are used for packet detection. We evaluate the detection capabilities of both solutions via numerical simulations. We also evaluate numerically the spectral efficiency achieved by the proposed approach, highlighting its benefits.