Impact of Successive Interference Cancellation on the Capacity of Wireless Networks: Joint Optimal Link Scheduling and Power Control

In this paper, we study the performance of multi-hop wireless networks when both proper interference control and effective spatial reuse are jointly considered. For the former, we assume nodes endowed with Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) capabilities at the physical layer and for the latter, we advocate joint link scheduling and power allocation. We study the achievable performance of such networks through a cross-layer design framework. We formulate the joint problem of routing, link scheduling and power allocation as a mixed integer non-linear program (MINLP) and we use column generation (CG) to decompose and linearize it, and hence, solve it. Our numerical results show that when SIC and power control are combined, around 75% performance improvement in dense networks may be achieved in comparison with a network that does not incorporate any advanced interference management techniques.