Harmonizing SIC and MIMO DoF Interference Cancellation for Efficient Network-Wide Resource Allocation

Recent advances in MIMO degree-of-freedom (DoF)models allow us to study MIMO in a multi-hop network environment. On the other hand, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is a powerful physical layer technique used in multi-user detection. Based on the strengths and weaknesses of MIMO DoF and SIC, we propose a marriage between these two techniques so that DoF-based interference cancellation (IC) and SIC can help each other as follows: (i) SIC is exploited to decode multiple received signals to conserve DoF resources in IC, and (ii) DoFIC resolves the potential SINR barrier that SIC may encounter. In this paper, we develop the necessary mathematical models to realize the two ideas in a multi-hop wireless network. Together with scheduling and routing constraints, we develop a cross-layer optimization framework with joint DoF IC and SIC. By applying the framework on a throughput maximization problem, we find that SIC and DoF IC can indeed offer significant performance improvement by addressing each other's limitation.