Capacity-optimized topology control for cooperative wireless networks with interference cancellation

With recent advances in parallel cooperative transmissions between multiple source-destination pairs, interference cancellation (IC) can be achieved to improve sum data rate for one group of cooperating users. However, from the perspective of network capacity, user cooperation may not be always appealing, since the increased sum data rate of cooperating users comes at the price of blocking more neighboring users. In this paper, we study the potential benefits/drawbacks of cooperative communications on network capacity. We show that, in terms of network capacity, cooperative communications do not always outperform traditional non-cooperative communications, and cooperative communications should be dynamically applied in topology control to optimize the overall network capacity. Specifically, we propose a distributed Cooperative topology control scheme with Opportunistic IC (COIC) to improve network capacity. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.