  We consider a general class of wireless scheduling and resource allocation
problems where the received rate in each link is determined by the actions of
the transmitter in that link along with a single dominant interferer. Such
scenarios arise in a range of scenarios, particularly in emerging femto- and
picocellular networks with strong, localized interference. For these networks,
a utility maximizing scheduler based on loopy belief propagation is presented
that enables computationally-efficient local processing and low communication
overhead. Our main theoretical result shows that the fixed points of the method
are provably globally optimal for arbitrary (potentially non-convex) rate and
utility functions. The methodology thus provides globally optimal solutions to
a large class of inter-cellular interference coordination problems including
subband scheduling, dynamic orthogonalization and beamforming whenever the
dominant interferer assumption is valid. The paper focuses on applications for
systems with interference cancellation (IC) and suggests a new scheme on
optimal rate control, as opposed to traditional power control. Simulations are
presented in industry standard femtocellular network models demonstrate
significant improvements in rates over simple reuse 1 without IC, and near
optimal performance of loopy belief propagation for rate selection in only one
or two iterations.
