Reverse link capacity and interference statistics of a fixed-step power-controlled DS/CDMA system under slow multipath fading

Power control (PC) on the reverse link of a direct-sequence code-division multiple-access system is essential to increase system capacity. Perfect PC eliminates fluctuations in the received signal level and hence reduces the required signal-to-interference ratio. However, a perfect PC algorithm tracks multipath fading accurately, which results in increasing the intercell interference level. A fixed step PC algorithm becomes almost perfect when the power command rate is too fast compared to the Doppler rate, which is the case for low-mobility users. We investigate the statistics of the intercell interference assuming users are moving slowly. These statistics are then used to find the system capacity. Three parameters that can affect the capacity are considered: the number of the fading process resolvable paths, the maximum transmitted power, and soft handoff