Joint scheduling and power control for wireless ad-hoc networks

In this paper we introduce power control as a solution to the multiple access problem in contention-based wireless ad-hoc networks. The motivation for this study is two fold, limiting multi-user interference to increase single-hop throughput, and reducing power consumption to increase battery life. We focus on next neighbor transmissions where nodes are required to send information packets to their respective receivers subject to a constraint on the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio. The multiple access problem is solved via two alternating phases, namely scheduling and power control. The scheduling algorithm is essential to coordinate the transmissions of independent users in order to eliminate strong interference (e.g. self-interference) that can not be overcome by power control. On the other hand, power control is executed in a distributed fashion to determine the admissible power vector, if one exists, that can be used by the scheduled users to satisfy their single-hop transmission requirements. This is done for two types of networks, namely TDMA and TDMA/CDMA wireless ad-hoc networks.