Decentralized dynamic power control for cellular CDMA systems

The control of transmit power has been recognized as an essential requirement in the design of cellular code-division multiple-access (CDMA) systems. Indeed, power control allows for mobile users to share radio resources equitably and efficiently in a multicell environment. Much of the work on power control for CDMA systems found in the literature assumes a quasi-static channel model, i.e., the channel gains of the users are assumed to be constant over a sufficiently long period of time for the control algorithm to converge. In this paper, the design of dynamic power control algorithms for CDMA systems is considered without the quasi-static channel restriction. The design problem is posed as a tradeoff between the desire for users to maximize their individual quality of service and the need to minimize interference to other users. The dynamic nature of the wireless channel for mobile users is incorporated in the problem definition. Based on a cost minimization framework, an optimal multiuser solution is derived. The multiuser solution is shown to decouple, and effectively converge, to a single-user solution in the large system asymptote, where the number of users and the spreading factor both go to infinity with their ratio kept constant. In a numerical study, the performance of a simple threshold policy is shown to be near that of the optimal single-user policy. This offers support to the threshold decision rules that are employed in current cellular CDMA systems.