Link Scheduling in Cooperative Communication with SINR-Based Interference

Abstract

Though intensive research efforts have been devoted to the study of the link scheduling problem in wireless networks, no previous work has discussed this problem for cooperative communication networks, in which receivers are allowed to combine messages from different senders to combat transmission errors. In this paper, we study the link scheduling problem in wireless cooperative communication networks, in which receivers are allowed to combine copies of a message to combat fading. We formulate two problems named cooperative link scheduling problem (CLS) and one-shot cooperative link scheduling problem (OCLS). The first problem aims to find a schedule of links that uses the minimum number of time slots to inform all the receivers. The second problem aims to find a set of links that can inform the maximum number of receivers in one time slot. As a solution, we propose an algorithm for both CLS and OCLS with g(K) approximation ratio, where g(K) is so called diversity of key links. In addition, we propose a greedy algorithm with O(1) approximation ratio for OCLS when the number of links for each receiver is upper bounded by a constant. Simulation results indicate that our cooperative link scheduling approaches outperform non-cooperative ones.