Distributed Power Control for Interference-Limited Cooperative Relay Networks

In this paper, a distributed power control algorithm is proposed for wireless relay networks in interference-limited environments. The objective is to minimize the total transmission power while satisfying the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements. Two forwarding techniques, i.e., decode- and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF), are considered. The proposed algorithm only requires locally measured SINR on the relay nodes (RNs) and the destination nodes (DNs), based on which each cooperation unit (defined as one source node (SN) and DN pair with the RN associated to it) iteratively updates the transmission power of the SN and the RN by solving a local optimization problem. We prove that the convergence is guaranteed when the parameters adopted in the algorithm are sufficiently large, and then a parameter adjusting method is also designed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm converges fast and leads to only 7% more power consumption than the optimal power allocation in the considered scenarios. It is also shown that even in interference-limited environments, relaying can still improve system performance substantially in terms of outage and power consumption.