Transmission Capacity of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: Successive Interference Cancellation vs. Joint Detection

The performance benefits of two interference cancellation methods, successive interference cancellation (SIC) and joint detection (JD), in wireless ad hoc networks are compared within the transmission capacity framework. SIC involves successively decoding and subtracting out strong interfering signals until the desired signal can be decoded, while higher-complexity JD refers to simultaneously decoding the desired signal and the signals of a few strong interferers. Tools from stochastic geometry are used to develop bounds on the outage probability as a function of the spatial density of interferers. These bounds show that SIC performs nearly as well as JD when the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) threshold is less than one, but that SIC is essentially useless for SIR thresholds larger than one whereas JD provides a significant outage benefit regardless of the SIR threshold.