Joint Power and Rate Control for Delay Tolerant Traffic in a Wireless System

A power and rate control scheme especially crafted for delay tolerant traffic under interfering link conditions is presented in this paper. Specifically, an iterative distributed algorithm, based on a sum-power constrained sum-rate maximization with upper (and lower) power and rate constraints, is developed. The feasibility and performance of the algorithm is demonstrated by simulation in a cellular system, where it is applied both for SISO and MIMO links. Simulations show significant improvement of the sum-rate vs. sum-power relation compared to both HSDPA-like "fixed power adaptive rate" and GSM-like "fixed rate adaptive power" radio resource management. Also, the method offers automatic re-use handling by silencing sub-optimal links. In a MIMO scenario, the sum-rate scales near linearly with the number of antenna elements.