Optimal scheduling and QoS power control for cognitive underlay networks

We study the NP-hard problem of scheduling and power control with quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. We consider a generic wireless network comprising K mutually interfering links and N < K orthogonal time or frequency slots. We formulate the joint resource allocation problem as a constrained optimization problem, specifically, as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem. This enables us to solve the problem exactly, and relatively efficiently for the vast majority of instances, using off-the-shelf algorithms. We also apply our formulation to the paradigm of cognitive underlay networks.