Analysis of power ramping schemes for UTRA-FDD random access channel

The random access channel (RACH) in a universal terrestrial radio access-frequency division duplex (UTRA-FDD) system is a contention-based channel mainly used to carry control information from mobile stations (MS) to base stations (BS). The transmission of a random access request contains two steps: preamble transmission and message transmission. In preamble transmission, the power ramping technique is used to favor the delayed preambles by stepping up the transmission power after each unsuccessful access. In doing so, the success of transmitting a long-delayed preamble is increased due to the power capture effect. This paper analyzes the blocking, throughput, and delay performance of preamble transmission under three power ramping schemes with fixed, linear, and geometric step sizes. The interference caused by different power ramping schemes is also compared.