GRU-Based Winner Subcarrier Detection in Frequency Domain Contention

Single-carrier frequency domain contention (S-FDC) is an efficient wireless contention mechanism based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). In each round of S-FDC, each node randomly selects and signals on one of the OFDM subcarriers while listening to all subcarriers simultaneously. Each node independently detects the activated subcarrier with the smallest index and regards it as the winner subcarrier. Accurately detecting the winner subcarrier is crucial to ensuring the functionality of the network. However, it is extremely difficult in practice due to power leakage problems that arise from frequency asynchronization among nodes. In this paper, we propose a gated-recurrent-unit (GRU)-based model that incorporates S-FDC's unique features as domain knowledge to enable accurate winner subcarrier detection. Extensive simulation experiments verify that our DL model is effective and outperforms state of the art. This research highlights the potential of DL in improving wireless communication systems.