Distributed power allocation for next-generation cognitive wireless devices

It is foreseen that new cognitive wireless communications devices will incorporate multiple reconfigurable radios in the near future. In this paper, we concentrate on the problem of allocating the device power to the radios and we discuss the advantages of distributed approaches in front of centralized designs. Motivated by the scalability in the design and by the potential reduction of signalling information between the transceivers and the power controller, we develop a new power allocation algorithm that is based on a novel decomposition algorithm, called coupled-decompositions method. As a result, we reduce the signalling requirements by a factor 10 with respect to centralized approaches and by a factor 3 with respect to a classical primal decomposition approach. Furthermore, the resulting technique is expected to adapt faster and more robustly to changes in the scenario conditions.