Distributed interferer-channel aware scheduling in large-scale wireless ad hoc networks

Opportunistic scheduling and routing can in principle greatly increase the throughput of decentralized wireless networks, but to be practical such algorithms must do so with small amounts of timely side information. In this paper, we propose a low-overhead distributed opportunistic scheduling (DOS) scheme, termed distributed interferer-channel aware scheduling (DICAS), and precisely determine its affect on the overall network outage probability and transmission capacity (TC). The main contribution is determining the appropriate channel and interference thresholds that a given isolated transmitter should estimate and apply when scheduling its own transmissions. Using the thresholds, the precise network-wide gain of DICAS is quantified and compared. We conclude by considering the geometric interpretation of DICAS that provides an intuitive concept of how DICAS improves TC.