Joint back-pressure power control and interference cancellation in wireless multi-hop networks

Back-pressure routing and power control policies are well-appreciated for maximizing throughput in wireless multi-hop networks, where power control is used to manage interference in a way that ultimately optimizes throughput, a network-layer performance measure. In addition to transmitter power control, interference can be mitigated via selective receiver-side signal cancellation, provided that the signal to be cancelled can be reliably decoded. This paper considers joint back-pressure power control and interference cancellation, assuming that each receiver can cancel at most one interfering signal. It is shown that the joint problem is NP-hard, and a suitable convex approximation is developed and shown to yield significant gains in terms of end-to-end throughput relative to power control alone. The main methodological contribution is in terms of a fortuitous reformulation of the joint problem, which is of potentially broader interest.