Interference in Cellular Networks: The Minimum Membership Set Cover Problem

The infrastructure for mobile distributed tasks is often formed by cellular networks. One of the major issues in such networks is interference. In this paper we tackle interference reduction by suitable assignment of transmission power levels to base stations. This task is formalized introducing the Minimum Membership Set Cover combinatorial optimization problem. On the one hand we prove that in polynomial time the optimal solution of the problem cannot be approximated more closely than with a factor ln n. On the other hand we present an algorithm exploiting linear programming relaxation techniques which asymptotically matches this lower bound.