On Topology Improvement of a Packet Radio Network by Power Control

The Packet Radio Network (PRN) is an attractive architecture to support wireless data communication. The code assignment problem in PRN is a classical problem that has been extensively studied. However, in this paper we observe that the power control issue has been ignored by most works, but may have significant impact on PRN's performance. Given a set of PRN stations, the network topology can be changed by adjusting each station's transmission power. All existing works, nevertheless, assume that the network topology is given before solving the code assignment problem. In this paper, we regard code assignment as an independent problem, and show how to improve the network topology by power adjustment without violating the original code assignment. The improvement in topology (such as more links in the network) may result in improvement in network throughput. Through simulations, we demonstrate that although the code assignment problem is NP-complete, using our power adjustment schemes can easily improve the network performance by about 10% with polynomial costs