Frequency Coordination in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

This paper considers coordination of users in wireless ad-hoc networks. We define coordination as a scheme that tries to achieve the rate region given by Shannon's capacity by allowing users to exchange information and agree upon future actions, while still treating interference as noise. This differs from cooperative schemes which try to increase the achievable rate region by introducing and exploiting structure in the interference. The advantage of coordination compared to cooperation is that coordination does not require strict user synchronization and global knowledge of system parameters. Using orthogonalization as the means of coordination, we find conditions for when users should coordinate. Through simulations we investigate the performance of coordination compared to selfish and selfless autonomous power algorithms. Results show that in some scenarios coordination yield high gain, however since our coordination scheme only guarantees to outperform selfish algorithms; full orthogonalization can outperform our coordination scheme in some scenarios.