  A fundamental aspect in performance engineering of wireless networks is
optimizing the set of links that can be concurrently activated to meet given
signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) thresholds. The solution of this
combinatorial problem is the key element in scheduling and cross-layer resource
management. Previous works on link activation assume single-user decoding
receivers, that treat interference in the same way as noise. In this paper, we
assume multiuser decoding receivers, which can cancel strongly interfering
signals. As a result, in contrast to classical spatial reuse, links being close
to each other are more likely to be active simultaneously. Our goal here is to
deliver a comprehensive theoretical and numerical study on optimal link
activation under this novel setup, in order to provide insight into the gains
from adopting interference cancellation. We therefore consider the optimal
problem setting of successive interference cancellation (SIC), as well as the
simpler, yet instructive, case of parallel interference cancellation (PIC). We
prove that both problems are NP-hard and develop compact integer linear
programming formulations that enable us to approach the global optimum
solutions. We provide an extensive numerical performance evaluation, indicating
that for low to medium SINR thresholds the improvement is quite substantial,
especially with SIC, whereas for high SINR thresholds the improvement
diminishes and both schemes perform equally well.
