MAC Design for Analog Network Coding

Abstract

Most medium access control (MAC) mechanisms discard collided packets and consider interference harmful. Recent work on Analog Network Coding (ANC) suggests a different approach, in which multiple interfering transmissions are strategically scheduled. Receiving nodes collect the results of collisions and then use a decoding process, such as ZigZag decoding, to extract the packets involved in the collisions.

In this paper, we present an algebraic representation of collisions and describe a general approach to recovering collisions using ANC. To study the effects of using ANC on the performance of MAC layers, we develop an ANC-based MAC algorithm, CMAC, and analyze its performance in terms of probabilistic latency guarantees for local packet delivery. Specifically, we prove that CMAC implements an abstract MAC layer service, as defined in [14, 13]. This study shows that ANC can significantly improve the performance of the abstract MAC layer service compared to conventional probabilistic transmission approaches.

We illustrate how this improvement in the MAC layer can translate into faster higher-level algorithms, by analyzing the time complexity of a multi-message network-wide broadcast algorithm that uses CMAC.