Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Successive Interference Cancellation

The transmission capacity of a wireless ad hoc network is defined as the maximum allowable spatial density of transmissions such that the outage probability does not exceed some specified threshold. This work studies the improvement in transmission capacity obtainable with successive interference cancellation (SIC), an important receiver technique that has been shown to achieve the capacity of several classes of multiuser channels, but has not been carefully evaluated in an uncentralized wireless network. This paper develops closed-form bounds for the transmission capacity of CDMA ad hoc networks with SIC receivers. Several design-relevant insights are obtained: i) although the capacity gain from perfect SIC is very large, any imperfections in the interference cancellation rapidly degrades its usefulness; ii) only a few – often just one – interfering nodes need to be cancelled in order to get the vast majority of the available performance gain.