Link Scheduling in Wireless Networks with Successive Interference Cancellation

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is an effective technique of multipacket reception to combat interference. As not all collision are resolvable, careful transmission coordination is required. We study link scheduling in wireless networks with SIC at the physical layer. A new model, simultaneity graph (SG), is proposed to characterize the link correlation introduced by SIC. Then two new scheduling schemes are presented: 1) a slot-oriented scheme which assigns a maximal feasible link set to a time slot and 2) a link-oriented scheme which assigns each link a sufficient number of slots. The performance is evaluated by simulations and the results demonstrate that the throughput gain is on average 50% and up to 110% over IEEE 802.11. The complexity of SG is only a bit higher than that of the available widely-used models (e.g., conflict graph).