A framework for uplink power control in cellular radio systems

In cellular wireless communication systems, transmitted power is regulated to provide each user an acceptable connection by limiting the interference caused by other users. Several models have been considered including: (1) fixed base station assignment where the assignment of users to base stations is fixed, (2) minimum power assignment where a user is iteratively assigned to the base station at which its signal to interference ratio is highest, and (3) diversity reception where a user's signal is combined from several or perhaps all base stations. For the above models, the uplink power control problem can be reduced to finding a vector p of users' transmitter powers satisfying p⩾I(p) where the jth constraint p_j⩾I_j(p) describes the interference that user j must overcome to achieve an acceptable connection. This work unifies results found for these systems by identifying common properties of the interference constraints. It is also shown that systems in which transmitter powers are subject to maximum power limitations share these common properties. These properties permit a general proof of the synchronous and totally asynchronous convergence of the iteration p(t+1)=I(p(t)) to a unique fixed point at which total transmitted power is minimized