Performance of error control schemes for fading channels with power-control and MAI

The paper presents a method for evaluating the performance of error control schemes for wireless channels that exhibit interference limitation and are subjected to fast power control. The approach is specifically intended for error control schemes based on efficient coding techniques, such as turbo codes, and for DS-CDMA systems. In these systems, multiple access interference (MAI) is the main limitation to system capacity, and fast closed loop power control is adopted to compensate for rapid variations of both user signal and interference strength. The paper adopts a semi-analytical method that consists of the following steps: 1) simulation of closed-loop fast power control algorithms; 2) Markov modeling of the SIR, by means of a statistical analysis of samples of SIR that returns the order of the Markov chain and the related transition probabilities; 3) analytical evaluation of error control technique performance based on the determined Markov model. To assess the accuracy of the method, some results obtained by full system simulation are also presented.