A proximal minimization based distributed approach to power control in wireless networks: Performance and comparative analysis

In this paper, we address power control in a wireless cellular network where multiple mobile users are served by a set of base stations, one per cell. Their reference base station has then to set their transmission power so as to maximize the level of service measured in terms of transmission throughput. Interference due to communication of devices on the same wireless channel is coupling the decisions of all base stations in the cellular network. We propose a distributed algorithm based on proximal minimization that makes the base stations reach consensus to a solution that guarantees an optimal throughput for all mobile devices, by appropriately setting the signal to interference plus noise ratio. The introduced algorithm is compared with a gradient-based distributed algorithm via an extensive simulation study, which reveals the advantage of proximal minimization in the case when the cost function is non-differentiable and the sub-gradient has to be computed.