Multichannel power control for data traffic in wireless networks

We propose a multichannel power control scheme for packetized data traffic over wireless channels. The system being studied comprises a central transmitter communicating with multiple users over different channels, where the transmitter has a ceiling on the sum of powers transmitted to different users. Such situations can arise in wireless LANs and in some cellular communication systems. The optimal power to be transmitted by the central transmitter to each user independent of all the other users is formulated as a dynamic programming problem. The greedy algorithm makes sure that the constraint on the sum of powers is satisfied. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that of a well known algorithm, using simulations. We observe that under high arrival rates, the multichannel power control scheme results in higher throughput even while using less power