Power Allocation and Control in Multimedia CDMA Wireless Systems

Abstract. This paper proposes an analysis of outage performance of a Direct Sequence-Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) wireless system with heterogeneous traffic. Imperfections in closed-loop power control and the activity characteristics of any traffic source in the system are taken into account. For given requirements of signal-to-(noise + interference) ratio and outage probability of every user in the system, the system capacity is derived in terms of the maximum number of users of each class that can be accomodated. The optimization problem is explicitly solved for a system consisting of a single cell and an approach is outlined for solving the optimization problem in a multi-cell system. The analysis is carried out by resorting to various approximations of Multiple Access Interference (MAI), that require different methods for solving the optimization problem and yield different degrees of accuracy. From numerical results it is seen that optimal power allocation is essential to limit the effects of power control imperfections, mainly in the case of non uniform amplitudes of residual power fluctuations. In the second part of the paper, a performance study of fixed step closed-loop power control algorithms is presented. A detailed simulation of the power control loop evidences that fast fading phenomena can not be easily tracked, even at moderate Doppler spread. Statistics of residual power fluctuations are estimated and can be used to support the assumptions in the first part of the paper. Furthermore, second order statistics of the controlled channel are estimated, and second order outage statistics (average rate and duration of outage events) are derived as a quantitative measure of residual channel burstiness.