Adaptive Minimum-Variance Closed-Loop Power Control in CDMA Cellular Systems

This paper introduces a new application of adaptive control theory to power control in a code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular system operating over mobile fading radio channels. Conventional feedback power control algorithms allow the base station to send a power command to either raise or lower each user’s transmission power according to a bang-bang-like control policy. In this paper, we present an adaptive minimum-variance power control methodology which can be shown to improve power control performance consistently against a random nature of the near-far effect, shadowing and fast varying fading. Two adaptive implementations are considered: direct and indirect control. In the indirect adaptive control, a minimum-variance controller is combined with a constrained estimation algorithm to ensure the stability of a link gain model. In the direct adaptive control, the controller parameters are obtained directly from a standard estimation algorithm. Our simulations have shown that the proposed adaptive minimum-variance power control schemes provide much smaller error variance than the conventional fixed-step bang-bang control scheme and consequently the reverse channel capacity of the CDMA system can be significantly increased. key words: CDMA, power control, adaptive control, minimum