Joint scheduling and interference cancellation in ad hoc networks

We devise a new cross-layer design scheme that combines a scheduling protocol at the medium access control (MAC) layer and interference cancellation at the physical layer. We show that this scheme greatly improves ad hoc network throughput. Specifically, at the MAC layer, transmission schedules for each node are generated with a pseudo-random number generator, and the schedules for each node are efficiently shared with all neighbors within a two-hop distance by exchanging only the corresponding pseudo-random number generator seed. [R. Rozovsky and P. R. Kumar, October 4-5, 2001] Using the knowledge of which neighbors could possibly transmit at any given time, each node performs successive interference cancellation (SlC) to resolve packet collisions, thereby allowing multiple simultaneous transmissions. We illustrate the improvement of the overall network throughput via numerical analysis.