The Power of Non-Uniform Wireless Power

We study a fundamental measure for wireless interference in the SINR model when powercontrol is available. This measure characterizes the effectiveness of using oblivious power —when the power used by a transmitter only depends on the distance to the receiver — as amechanism for improving wireless capacity.We prove optimal bounds for this measure, implying a number of algorithmic applications.An algorithm is provided that achieves — due to existing lower bounds — capacity that isasymptotically best possible using oblivious power assignments. Improved approximationalgorithms are provided for a number of problems for oblivious power and for power control,including distributed scheduling, secondary spectrum auctions, wireless connectivity, anddynamic packet scheduling. ∗ICE-TCS, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, Reykjavik, Iceland. [email protected],[email protected]†Distributed Computing Group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. {stholzer, wattenhofer}@ethz.ch