Wireless Scheduling with Dominant Interferers and Applications to Femtocellular Interference Cancellation

We consider a general class of wireless scheduling and resource allocation problems where the received rate in each link is determined by the actions of the transmitter in that link along with a single dominant interferer. Such scenarios arise in a range of scenarios, particularly in emerging femtoand picocellular networks with strong, localized interference. For these networks, a utility maximizing scheduler based on loopy belief propagation is presented that enables computationallyefficient local processing and low communication overhead. Our main theoretical result shows that the fixed points of the method are provably globally optimal for arbitrary (potentially nonconvex) rate and utility functions. The methodology thus provides globally optimal solutions to a large class of inter-cellular interference coordination problems including subband scheduling, dynamic orthogonalization and beamforming whenever the dominant interferer assumption is valid. The paper focuses on applications for systems with interference cancellation (IC) and suggests a new scheme on optimal rate control, as opposed to traditional power control. Simulations are presented in industry standard femtocellular network models demonstrate significant improvements in rates over simple reuse 1 without IC, and near optimal performance of loopy belief propagation for rate selection in only one or two iterations.