The power control strategy for mine locomotive wireless network based on successive interference cancellation

Abstract

In a mine locomotive wireless network, multiple locomotives move along a tunnel and communicate with access points (APs) on the side of this tunnel. The underground working environment is not safe and thus it is important to maintain high quality communication links. We consider throughput maximization for a mine locomotive wireless network with successive interference cancellation (SIC) and power control. We define time segments such that within each segment, the set of locomotives that can communicate with an AP is fixed and the distance from each locomotive to this AP can be approximated as a constant. To maximize throughput for each segment, we first prove the existence of optimal solutions that satisfy certain features on SIC decoding order and SINR under SIC. Then we can formulate a linear programming problem to obtain optimal solutions. We further propose a concept of the maximum SIC set to reduce problem size and obtain a polynomial complexity algorithm. Simulation results show that our algorithm can increase throughput significantly by comparing with the algorithm using SIC only (no power control) and comparing with the algorithm without using SIC and power control.