Cooperative Retransmissions Through Collisions

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, the authors 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), they 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.