Effect of power control imperfections on the reverse link of cellular CDMA networks under multipath fading

In this paper, we present an analytical approach for the evaluation of the impact of power control errors on the reverse link of a multicell direct sequence code-division multiple access (CDMA) system with fast power control under multipath fading. Unlike many previous papers, the joint effect of multipath fading and fast power control on interference statistics is explicitly accounted for and mobiles are assumed to connect to a base station according to a minimum attenuation criterion. Both the average bit error rate (BER) and the outage probabilities that a user experiences are estimated. The results have been used to evaluate the system capacity from two points of view. First, the maximum capacity supported by the system in order to maintain an average BER below a prescribed level has been calculated. Second, the maximum capacity possible to ensure that the outage probability does not exceed a set limit is analyzed. Capacity is shown to be significantly affected by the imperfections of power control. Our results can be used to quantify the relative capacity loss due to fast power control errors in a cellular CDMA network affected by slow fading, multipath fading, and cochannel interference.