On Optimal Link Activation with Interference Cancellation in Wireless Networking (1112.1314v2)

Abstract: A fundamental aspect in performance engineering of wireless networks is optimizing the set of links that can be concurrently activated to meet given signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) thresholds. The solution of this combinatorial problem is the key element in scheduling and cross-layer resource management. Previous works on link activation assume single-user decoding receivers, that treat interference in the same way as noise. In this paper, we assume multiuser decoding receivers, which can cancel strongly interfering signals. As a result, in contrast to classical spatial reuse, links being close to each other are more likely to be active simultaneously. Our goal here is to deliver a comprehensive theoretical and numerical study on optimal link activation under this novel setup, in order to provide insight into the gains from adopting interference cancellation. We therefore consider the optimal problem setting of successive interference cancellation (SIC), as well as the simpler, yet instructive, case of parallel interference cancellation (PIC). We prove that both problems are NP-hard and develop compact integer linear programming formulations that enable us to approach the global optimum solutions. We provide an extensive numerical performance evaluation, indicating that for low to medium SINR thresholds the improvement is quite substantial, especially with SIC, whereas for high SINR thresholds the improvement diminishes and both schemes perform equally well.