  The interference management technique that treats interference as noise (TIN)
is optimal when the interference is sufficiently low. Scheduling algorithms
based on the TIN optimality condition have recently been proposed, e.g., for
application to device-to-device communications. TIN, however, has never been
applied to cellular networks. In this work, we propose a scheduling algorithm
for application to cellular networks that is based on the TIN optimality
condition. In the proposed scheduling algorithm, each base station (BS) first
randomly selects a user equipment (UE) in its coverage region, and then checks
the TIN optimality conditions. If the latter conditions are not fulfilled, the
BS is turned off. In order to assess the performance of TIN applied to cellular
networks, we introduce an analytical framework with the aid of stochastic
geometry theory. We develop, in particular, tractable expressions of the
signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) coverage probability and average
rate of cellular networks. In addition, we carry out asymptotic analysis to
find the optimal system parameters that maximize the SINR coverage probability.
By using the optimized system parameters, it is shown that TIN applied to
cellular networks yields significant gains in terms of SINR coverage
probability and average rate. Specifically, the numerical results show that
average rate gains of the order of $21\%$ over conventional scheduling
algorithms are obtained.
