A Survey on Multipacket Reception for Wireless Random Access Networks

Multipacket reception (MPR) is the capability of simultaneous decoding of more than one packet from multiple concurrent transmissions. Continuous investigations on increasing the reception capability are giving new scientific contributions. In this paper, we provide an overview of MPR-related research work covering (1) the theoretically proved impacts and advantages of using MPR from a channel perspective to network capacity and throughput; (2) the various technologies that enable MPR from transmitter, transreceiver, and receiver perspectives; (3) previous work on protocol improvement to better exploit MPR. Indeed, MPR approaches have been applied in modern wireless mobile systems but the focus of this paper is to discuss MPR in random access wireless networks. Using MPR in such multihop environments calls for new adaptation on protocols, especially a cross-layer approach. To this end, we detail a scheduling method that targets full utilization of MPR capability.