SIR-balanced macro power control for the reverse link of CDMA sectorized distributed antenna system

The CDMA sectorized distributed antenna (SDA) is a novel antenna architecture which yields an increase in the reverse link capacity, in the order of the number of antenna elements used. In an SDA system, a power control algorithm that balances the SIR should be considered, since the conventional power-balanced power control algorithm results in considerable disparities among the SIR levels of different users. However, SIR-balancing for the SDA system is more complicated than that for the conventional central antenna systems due to macrodiversity. We use a power control algorithm which we refer to as SIR-balanced macro power control (SBMPC). SBMPC can be viewed as a special case of the power control algorithm introduced by Hanly (see IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.44, no.2, p.247-56, 1996) in the context of CDMA macrodiversity radio networks. In SBMPC, the set of equations to be solved are nonlinear (due to diversity) which makes the solutions for SIR-balancing algorithms, given in the literature, inapplicable. Therefore, we propose an iterative solution to the SBMPC algorithm which always converges. Because of the non-smooth convergence characteristics of the iterations, finding a suitable termination criterion for the iterations is a nontrivial problem. We suggest a multi-stage criterion which yields very low disparities among the SIR levels of different users for reasonably low number of iterations. Although the SBMPC algorithm and its iterative solution addressed in this paper are presented in the context of SDA systems, they may have wide applications. One such application is the power control problem in cellular systems employing macro diversity