ARM: Anonymous Rating Mechanism for Discrete Power Control

Abstract

Wireless interference management through continuous power control has been extensively studied in the literature. However, practical systems often adopt discrete power control with a limited number of power levels and MCSs (Modulation Coding Schemes). In general, discrete power control is NP-hard due to its combinatorial nature. To tackle this challenge, we propose an innovative approach of interference management: ARM (Anonymous Rating Mechanism). Inspired by the successes of the simple anonymous rating mechanism in E-commerce, we develop ARM as distributed near-optimal algorithm for solving the discrete power control problem ( i.e., the joint scheduling, power allocation, and modulation coding adaption problem) under the physical interference model. We show that ARM achieves a close-to-optimal network throughput with a low control overhead. We also characterize the performance gap of ARM with the theoretical optimal solution due to the loss of rating information, and study the trade-off between such gap and the convergence time of ARM. We present numerical results with practical parameter choices to validate the theoretical findings, and highlight the impacts of approximation factor, the number of power levels, and the incomplete rating information.