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 t hat power levels can be assigned from a continuous range. In practice, howe ver, power levels are assigned from a discrete set. In this work, we consid er the minimization of the total power transmitted over given discrete sets of available power levels subject to maintaining an acceptable signal qual ity 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 solut ion in a finite number of iterations which is polynomial in the number of p ower levels and the number of mobiles.