Distributed Cooperative Topology Control for WANETs With Opportunistic Interference Cancelation

Cooperative communications has received tremendous interests in wireless systems. The communication performance of a single source-destination pair can be enhanced via the help of relays in traditional cooperative communications. Recent advances in interference cancelation (IC) can further enhance the performance of parallel cooperative transmissions between multiple source-destination pairs. Although some works have been done on cooperative communications, most existing works are focused on link-level physical-layer issues. Consequently, the potential benefits of cooperative communications on network-level upper layer issues, such as topology control, are largely ignored in existing works. In this paper, we study the impacts of cooperative communications, particularly IC-based cooperative communications, on topology control in wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs). We propose a distributed cooperative topology control scheme with opportunistic IC (COIC) to improve network capacity in WANETs by jointly considering both upper layer network capacity and physical-layer cooperative communications with IC. We show that the benefits brought by cooperative communications are opportunistic, which rely on network structures and channel conditions. These opportunistic advantages have significant impacts on network capacity, and our proposed COIC can effectively capture these opportunities to substantially improve network capacity.