Distributed Power Control Algorithms for Wireless Networks

Power control has been shown to be an effective way to increase capacity in wireless systems. In previous work on power control, it has been assumed that power levels can be assigned from a continuous range. In practice, however, power levels are assigned from a discrete set. In this work, we consider the minimization of the total power transmitted over given discrete sets of available power levels subject to maintaining an acceptable signal quality for each mobile. We have developed distributed iterative algorithms for solving a more general version of this integer programming problem, which is of independent interest, and have shown that they find the optimal solution in a finite number of iterations which is polynomial in the number of power levels and the number of mobiles. Index Terms--Cellular networks, distributed algorithms, integer programming, power control.