  In random-access networks, such as the IEEE 802.11 network, different users
may transmit their packets simultaneously, resulting in packet collisions.
Traditionally, the collided packets are simply discarded. To improve
performance, advanced signal processing techniques can be applied to extract
the individual packets from the collided signals. Prior work of ours has shown
that the symbol misalignment among the collided packets can be exploited to
improve the likelihood of successfully extracting the individual packets.
However, the failure rate is still unacceptably high. This paper investigates
how channel coding can be used to reduce the failure rate. We propose and
investigate a decoding scheme that incorporates the exploitation of the
aforementioned symbol misalignment into the channel decoding process. This is a
fine-grained integration at the symbol level. In particular, collision
resolution and channel decoding are applied in an integrated manner. Simulation
results indicate that our method outperforms other schemes, including the
straightforward method in which collision resolution and channel coding are
applied separately.
