A Multi-packet Reception Method Based on Cooperative Communication for Wireless Mesh Networks

Cooperative communication enables nodes to share their antennas to form a virtual multiple-input multiple-output system and achieve spatial diversity gain. Exploiting the diversity gain of V-MIMO channels, a multi-packet reception method is proposed to employ cooperative strategies in up links of wireless mesh networks. The method can support random amount of collided mesh clients by selecting cooperative nodes to form V-MIMO channels. Mesh routers with multiple antennas adopt the successive interference cancellation algorithm to receive separate the collided packets quickly. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method is capable of fully utilizing the spatial resources and outperforms the conventional NDMA and TDMA in terms of system throughput and transmission delay.