Joint scheduling and power control for multicasting in wireless ad hoc networks

This paper addresses the problem of power control in ad hoc networks supporting multicast traffic. We face the problem of sending packet traffic to the specified neighbors while meeting constraints on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the intended receivers. First, we present a distributed algorithm which, given the set of multicast senders and their corresponding receivers, provides an optimal solution which minimizes total transmit power, if there is any. Whenever no optimal solution can be found for the given set of multicast senders, we introduce a joint scheduling and power control algorithm, which eliminates the weak connections and tries to maximize the number of successful multicast transmissions. It allows other senders to solve the power control problem and minimize total transmit power. We show that our distributed algorithm performs close to centralized heuristic algorithms.