Characterization of Convex and Concave Resource Allocation Problems in Interference Coupled Wireless Systems

This paper investigates the possibility of having convex or concave formulations of optimization problems for interference coupled wireless systems. An axiomatic framework for interference functions proposed by Yates in 1995 is used to model interference coupling in our paper. The paper shows that under certain natural assumptions, the exponential transformation is the unique transformation (up to a positive constant) for “convexification” of resource allocation problems for linear interference functions. Furthermore, it is shown that under certain intuitive assumptions, it is sufficient to check for the joint concavity (convexity) of sum of weighted functions of SINR (inverse SINR) with respect to
s
(
p
=
es
, where
p
is the power vector of the users), if we would like the resulting resource allocation problem to be concave (convex). This paper characterizes the largest class of utility functions and the largest class of interference functions (respectively), which allow a convex and concave formulation of a problem for interference coupled wireless systems. It extends previous literature on log-convex interference functions and provides boundaries on the class of problems in wireless systems, which can be algorithmically tackled by convex optimization techniques.