Multi-Packet Communication by Spatial Reuse: Application Scenarios and Open Research Issues

This paper has the objective of identifying the application domain of a particular multi-packet strategy enabled by spatial reuse, which allows the simultaneous coexistence of multiple traffic flows in 802.11 wireless networks and is known as multi-packet communication (MPC). More precisely, this study outlines the differences between MPC and the widely investigated multi-packet reception (MPR) and multi-packet transmission (MPT) techniques, proposing extensions to the existing MPC theoretical models that aim to reliably estimate the throughput, the average successful packet delay, and the drop probability. The presented discussion involves the channel coding rate and the stochastic collision model, which determines the throughput-delay behavior of the network. Moving from the derived results, some open issues are identified as possible topics for the future research in the field of MPC.