Joint power and admission control via linear programming deflation

In an interference network, joint power and admission control aims to support a maximum number of links at their specified signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) targets while using a minimum total transmission power. Since this problem is NP-hard, convex approximation heuristics have been considered in the literature. In this work, we first reformulate the problem as a sparse ℓ₀-minimization problem and then relax it to a linear program (LP). Then, we derive an easily-checkable necessary condition for all links in the network to be simultaneously supported at their target SINR levels, and use it to iteratively remove strong interfering links (deflation). Numerical simulations show the proposed heuristic compares favorably with the existing approaches in terms of both the number of supported links and speed.