Interference cancelation vs. interference suppression in ad hoc networks

DS-CDMA physical layer with MAC scheduling is an effective technique to combat interference in ad hoc networks. The reduction in SINR requirement due to spreading gain provides attractive robustness against aggregate interference of more distant interferers. However, nearby interferers that can still cause an outage are inhibited through MAC scheduling. An alternative to scheduling is to employ interference-aware receivers that exploit information in the interfering signal with the goal of negating its effect on the desired transmission. In this paper interference supersession using MAC scheduling is compared with interference cancelation by employing successive interference cancelation (SIC). The results show that under strict outage constraint, inhibiting nearby nodes through scheduling is a better option than to employ SIC with imperfect channel estimation.