Joint Power Control and Link Scheduling in Wireless Networks for Throughput Optimization

This paper concerns the problem of finding the minimum-length TDMA frame of a power-controlled wireless network subject to traffic demands and SINR (signal- to-interference-plus-noise ratio) constraints. We formulate the general joint link scheduling and power control problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. The linear relaxation of the ILP problem has been claimed to be NP-hard in the literature. We present a computationally efficient heuristic algorithm, called the increasing demand greedy scheduling (IDGS) algorithm, to solve the general ILP problem. In addition, we propose using a column generation (CG) method as an augmentation to IDGS to further improve its performance. Simulation results show that integration of IDGS and CG can achieve superior performance in terms of both algorithm run time and solution optimality.