The problem of admission control in a multiceli downlink multiple-input single-output system is considered. The objective is to maximize the number of admitted users subject to a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio constraint at each admitted user and a transmit power constraint at each base station. We cast the admission control problem as an l 0 minimization problem. This problem is known to be combinatorial, NP-hard. Hence, we have to rely on suboptimal algorithms to solve it. We approximate the l 0 minimization problem via a non-combinatorial one. Then, we propose a distributed algorithm to solve the non-combinatorial problem. The proposed algorithm is derived by using alternating direction method of multipliers in conjunction with sequential convex programming. We show numerically that the proposed algorithm achieves a near-to-optimal performance.