Distributed link scheduling in wireless networks with interference cancellation capabilities

This paper considers the problem of link scheduling in wireless networks with interference cancellation (IC) capabilities and under the physical SINR interference model. We first present a cross layer formulation and then use duality theory to decompose the joint design problem into congestion control and routing/scheduling subproblems, which interact through congestion prices. Given that the problem of scheduling with IC and under the SINR interference regime has been shown to be NP-complete, this paper develops a decentralized approach which allows links to coordinate their transmissions and therefore efficiently solving the link scheduling problem. We show that our decentralized algorithm achieves very close performance to other centralized methods (e.g., greedy maximal scheduling). We also study the performance gains that IC brings to wireless networks and we show that flows in the network achieve up to twice their rates in most instances, in comparisons with networks without interference cancellation capabilities. These gains are attributed to the capabilities of SIC in better managing the interference in the network and promoting higher spatial reuse among contending links.