Processing interference at the physical layer to enhance information flow in wireless networks

Interference in wireless networks results in interdependent communication links between the nodes. Therefore, cross-layer design is essential and makes optimization of wireless networks complicated. In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing the information flow for a multicast session over a wireless network. Different scheduling and coding strategies to handle the interference, including the commonly used interference avoidance strategy, are compared. Results in information theory on achievable rate regions for interference networks are incorporated in the flow optimization to achieve significant improvement. Numerical results illustrate that processing interference at the physical layer results in better information flow compared to interference avoidance. © 2011 IEEE.