Association of uplink power control and base station assignment in cellular CDMA systems

In a wireless CDMA network a mobile is classically connected to the base station with the best received power level (R/spl times/L). The association (or the integration) of base station assignment with power control allows a given network to have better achievable performance. We investigate the association of base station assignment and power control in order to study the best achievable signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) behaviour. The existence of a feasible solution to the quality constraints problem, along with the choice of the base station assignment in order to have the minimal sum of transmitted powers, are discussed. This is done for a unique SIR target and for a multi-target environment. We also address two problems: the base station assignment as a function of network quality targets and best achievable performance which is represented by the highest achievable SIR for every possible BS assignment vector. This last value is computed with less computations than when it is directly calculated. Simulations show that appropriate base station assignment may give interesting capacity gains, especially for non-uniform distributions.