Context-Aware Scheduling in Wireless Networks with Successive Interference Cancellation

We consider the greedy scheduling based on the physical model in wireless networks with successive interference cancellation (SIC). There are two major stages in a scheduling scheme, link selection (to decide which link is scheduled next) and time slot selection (to deciding which slot is allocated to a given link). Most available schemes take a first-fit policy in the latter and strive to achieve good performance by careful selection of link ordering with respect to interference. Due to the accumulation effect and sequential detection nature of SIC, however, it is difficult to evaluate the interference of a link. As a result, many existing scheduling schemes become less efficient. In this paper, we take a new look on the problem and focus to the time slot selection stage. We define tolerance margin to measure the saturation of a link set and present two heuristic policies: one is to schedule a link to a slot such that the resulting set of links has a maximum tolerance margin; the other is to choose a slot such that the increase of tolerance margin is minimum. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed schemes is better than the first-fit policy and is close to the optimal solution.