Congestion Control, Routing, and Scheduling in Wireless Networks With Interference Cancelation Capabilities

Recently, there has been strong interest in exploiting advanced physical-layer techniques to increase the capacity of multihop wireless networks. Several recent studies have emerged with a particular focus on successive interference cancelation (SIC) as an effective approach to allow multiple adjacent concurrent transmissions to coexist, enabling multipacket reception. This paper is in line with those efforts in that we attempt to understand the benefits of SIC on the throughput performance of wireless networks. We consider a cross-layer design for the joint congestion control, routing, and scheduling problem in wireless networks where nodes are endowed with SIC capabilities and under the general physical signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) interference model. We use duality theory to decompose the joint design problem into congestion control and routing/scheduling subproblems, which interact through congestion prices. This decomposition enables us to solve the joint cross-layer design problem in a completely distributed manner. Given that the problem of scheduling with SIC and under the SINR interference regime is NP-hard, this paper develops a decentralized approach that allows links to coordinate their transmissions and, therefore, efficiently solve the link scheduling problem. Numerically, we show that our decentralized algorithm achieves similar results to those obtained by other centralized methods (e.g., greedy maximal scheduling). We also study the performance gains SIC brings to wireless networks, and we show that flows in the network achieve up to twice their rates in most instances, in comparison with networks without interference cancelation capabilities. These gains are attributed to the capabilities of SIC to better manage the interference and promote higher spatial reuse in the network.