Understanding the Scheduling Performance in Wireless Networks with Successive Interference Cancellation

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is an effective way of multipacket reception to combat interference in wireless networks. We focus on link scheduling in wireless networks with SIC, and propose a layered protocol model and a layered physical model to characterize the impact of SIC. In both the interference models, we show that several existing scheduling schemes achieve the same order of approximation ratios, independent of whether or not SIC is available. Moreover, the capacity order in a network with SIC is the same as that without SIC. We then examine the impact of SIC from first principles. In both chain and cell topologies, SIC does improve the throughput with a gain between 20 and 100 percent. However, unless SIC is properly characterized, any scheduling scheme cannot effectively utilize the new transmission opportunities. The results indicate the challenge of designing an SIC-aware scheduling scheme, and suggest that the approximation ratio is insufficient to measure the scheduling performance when SIC is available.