Theoretical analysis of reverse link capacity for an SIR-based power-controlled cellular CDMA system in a multipath fading environment

Capacity estimation in a code-division multiple-access system is closely related to power control schemes, which complicates the analysis due to the interaction between the signal power and the interference from other users and from other paths. For a signal-to-interference ratio (SIR)-based power control scheme, most previous work has been restricted to a single-cell system or to a multiple-cell system neglecting the effect of multipath fading. This paper is to give a theoretical foundation to the possible reverse link capacity of a multiple-cell system with perfect SIR-based power control, assuming two different multipath Rayleigh fading channel models: uniform and exponential power delay profiles. The effects of the numbers of resolvable propagation paths and RAKE fingers, and other system parameters such as the required E_b/I₀, the processing gain, and the maximum allowable transmit power of a mobile station, are investigated. The results are compared between single- and multiple-cell systems. When the number of resolvable paths is one or the number of Rake fingers is one, the link capacity becomes zero in a multiple-cell environment. This can be avoided by the use of antenna diversity. Antenna diversity reception is found to linearly increase the link capacity as the number of antennas increases