Joint end-to-end scheduling, power control and rate control in multi-hop wireless networks

This paper addresses the problem of joint scheduling, power control and rate control while maximizing end-to-end data rates in multi-hop wireless networks. Using a "physical layer" network model that explicitly takes into account interference due to spatial spectrum reuse, we formulate the throughput maximization problem as a mixed integer linear programming problem (MILP). While a MILP based approach yields an optimal solution, it does not scale well to large networks. To address this issue, we also present a computationally efficient water-filling based heuristic. Simulation results, obtained using our heuristic, highlight several capacity related tradeoffs that arise in wireless ad-hoc networks. Prior work only provides either asymptotic results on ad-hoc network capacity or, at best, techniques for computing loose upper bounds for throughput in specific instances of networks.