Joint cooperative scheduling and power control for interference-limited wireless networks

In this paper, we consider a joint cooperative scheduling and power control problem in interference-limited wireless ad hoc networks. In particular, we investigate the scenario where multiple pairs of users wish to communicate with their corresponding partners and each communication requires that its Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) is greater than a predetermined value for QoS guarantees. We propose to employ a decode-and-forward cooperative protocol jointly with the distributed Foschini-Miljanic power control algorithm to maximize the number of scheduled users in the network. In addition, we develop efficient handshaking and interference-aware relay selection mechanisms to achieve good throughput-overhead tradeoff for the proposed distributed protocol. We show that the proposed cooperative scheduling and power control algorithm is guaranteed to achieve better throughput than a non-cooperative scheduling algorithm based on direct communications and illustrate the performance gain through numerical studies.