Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) allows multiple transmissions in the same neighborhood by enabling both concurrent reception and interference rejection via decoding and subtracting the signals successively from the composite received signal. In this paper, we study the scheduling problem for minimizing the schedule length required to satisfy the traffic demands of the links in SIC based wireless ad hoc networks.
Upon proving the NP-hardness of the problem, we propose a novel efficient heuristic scheduling algorithm based on the greedy assignment of the links to each time slot by using a novel metric called Interference Effect (IE). The IE of a feasible link is defined as the total Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) drop of the links in the scheduled set with the addition of that link. We demonstrate via extensive simulations that the proposed algorithm performs better than the previous algorithms, with lower computational complexity.