Fair and efficient scheduling in wireless networks with successive interference cancellation

This paper considers the problem of uplink scheduling in wireless networks supporting successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the physical layer. By allowing concurrent interfering transmissions, SIC enables multi-packet reception at the receiver resulting in increased network throughput. Specifically, we consider maximum throughput scheduling and proportional fair scheduling problems and study optimal and heuristic algorithms for these problems. We prove that the maximum throughput scheduling problem is NP-hard and develop a throughput efficient polynomial time greedy algorithm for the problem. While being throughput efficient, the maximum throughput scheduling can lead to highly unfair rates among the users. The proportional fair scheduling, on the other hand, is not throughput optimal but achieves proportional fairness among the users. For scheduling multiple users in a single time-slot, we show that there exists an algorithm that solves the proportional fair scheduling problem in polynomial time. For scheduling in multiple time-slots, we develop a greedy algorithm that computes a highly fair schedule in polynomial time. Numerical results are also provided to show the utility and efficiency of the proposed scheduling algorithms in various simulated networks.