On the balancing of the base stations transmitted powers during soft handoff in cellular CDMA systems

Power control is essential in CDMA cellular systems to reduce the interference. During soft handoff, the mobile sends a single power control command that all the base stations should apply. Due to errors on the commands, the base stations can adjust their powers in opposite directions. This results in a loss of diversity gain. In this paper we propose changing the way the mobile issues the power control commands. This is basically to let the mobile repeat the same power control command over many slots. This results in reducing the number of times the base stations adjust their powers. This also reduces the error in the power control commands. We show that such an algorithm results in a considerable reduction in the deviation in the base station transmitted powers