  Several practical multi-user multi-carrier communication systems are
characterized by a multi-carrier interference channel system model where the
interference is treated as noise. For these systems, spectrum optimization is a
promising means to mitigate interference. This however corresponds to a
challenging nonconvex optimization problem. Existing iterative convex
approximation (ICA) methods consist in solving a series of improving convex
approximations and are typically implemented in a per-user iterative approach.
However they do not take this typical iterative implementation into account in
their design. This paper proposes a novel class of iterative approximation
methods that focuses explicitly on the per-user iterative implementation, which
allows to relax the problem significantly, dropping joint convexity and even
convexity requirements for the approximations. A systematic design framework is
proposed to construct instances of this novel class, where several new
iterative approximation methods are developed with improved per-user convex and
nonconvex approximations that are both tighter and simpler to solve (in
closed-form). As a result, these novel methods display a much faster
convergence speed and require a significantly lower computational cost.
Furthermore, a majority of the proposed methods can tackle the issue of getting
stuck in bad locally optimal solutions, and hence improve solution quality
compared to existing ICA methods.
