Distributed dynamic scheduling in wireless ad hoc networks with spatial randomness

It is well known that opportunistic scheduling and routing can be significantly leveraged in wireless ad hoc networks to improve the reliability of communication. However, complex opportunistic schemes incur a large overhead in terms of required channel state information leading to an overall degradation of the effective throughput. In this paper, we propose a distributed dynamic scheduling (DDS) scheme that has very little overhead and is easy to implement. DDS schedules a transmission by comparing the quality of the channel between a transmitter and its associated receiver to a dynamic threshold. We show that it is critical to choose the threshold as a function of the intensity of network transmissions and we quantify the gain using the transmission capacity (TC) framework. Our main results show that DDS can significantly increase the TC. In addition, we also show that the outage probability of DDS can be further reduced by using a geometry-based interference cancellation approach, which provides a fundamental view of how much outage probability can be improved by receivers.