Joint scheduling and power-allocation for interference management in wireless networks

Interference management is crucial in wireless communication systems because interference ultimately limits the system capacity. Opportunistic scheduling and power allocation are effective interference management mechanisms. In this paper, we present joint scheduling and power-allocation schemes to alleviate intercell interference. First, we study the problem with the objective to minimize the average transmission power, and thus interference to other cells, while maintaining the required data-rate for each user within the cell. Then we study the problem to maximize the net utility, defined as the difference between the value of throughput and the cost of power consumption, with the same data-rate requirements. We establish the optimality of our joint scheduling and power-allocation schemes for both problems in the paper.