All-to-all throughput maximization in wireless relay networks with multiple packet reception

Network Coding (NC) has shown the promise of significant throughput improvement to wireless networks. Meanwhile, Multiple Packet Reception (MPR) has been proved as an efficient way to combat the Multiple Access Interference (MAI) problem and to make wireless networks truly scalable. Their outstanding advantages to wireless network performance have attracted considerable research interests. In this paper, we find that the greedy use of MPR may take side effect to NC and degrade the overall network throughput for All-to-All (A2A) communication in two-way relay networks. To fully explore the potential of both MPR and NC, the transmission should be carefully scheduled. The optimal scheduling to achieve the maximum A2A throughput is then formulated as an Integer Programming (IP) problem. A heuristic transmission scheduling algorithm with low computational complexity is also proposed. Simulation results show that our heuristic algorithm performs very closely to the optimal solution obtained by solving the IP problem, and achieves a significantly improved performance over the greedy scheduling that always exhausts the MPR capacity. Furthermore, a non-strict monotonic relationship between the MPR capacity and the maximum A2A throughput has been also discovered from our experimental results.