Distributed discrete power control for bursty transmissions over wireless data networks

Distributed power control is an important issue in wireless networks. Recently, due to the bursty nature of data communication, packet switching is used in cellular systems. In addition, majority of previous power control algorithm assume that the transmitter power level can take values in a continuous domain. However, recent trends such as the GSM standard and QUALCOMM´s proposal to the IS-95 standard use a finite number of discretized power levels. These motivate the need to investigate solutions for distributed discrete power control for bursty transmission. Therefore, we propose a probabilistic power adaptation algorithm and analyze its theoretical properties along with the numerical behavior for bursty transmission. We approximate the discrete power control iterations by an equivalent ordinary differential equation (ODE) to prove that the proposed stochastic learning power control algorithm converges to a stable Nash equilibrium. Conditions when more than one stable Nash equilibrium may exist are also studied. Experimental results are presented for several cases and the impact of data burstiness on the proposed algorithm is also concerned.