On Optimal Link Activation With Interference Cancelation in Wireless Networking

A fundamental aspect in performance engineering of wireless networks is optimizing the set of links that can be concurrently activated to meet given signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) thresholds. The solution of this combinatorial problem is the key element in scheduling and cross-layer resource management. In this paper, we assume multiuser decoding (MUD) receivers, which can cancel strongly interfering signals. As a result, in contrast to classical spatial reuse, links being close to each other are more likely to be active concurrently. Our focus is to gauge the gain of successive interference cancelation (SIC) and the simpler, yet instructive, case of parallel interference cancelation (PIC) in the context of optimal link activation (LA). We show that both problems are NP-hard, and we develop compact integer linear programming (ILP) formulations to approach global optimality. We provide an extensive numerical performance evaluation, indicating that, for low to medium SINR thresholds, the improvement is quite substantial, particularly with SIC, whereas for high SINR thresholds, the improvement diminishes, and both schemes perform equally well.