An opportunistic power control algorithm for cellular network

We propose an opportunistic power control algorithm, which exploits channel fluctuation in order to maximize system throughput. The basic idea is that it instructs a transmitter to increase its power when the channel is good and to decrease its power when the channel is bad. The transmission rate is adjusted according to the received signal-to-interference ratio. The proposed algorithm is distributed and can be applied to systems in which the transmitters are connected to different receivers. We prove that the algorithm always converge to a unique fixed point and thus is stable. Simulation results show that a tremendous increase in system capacity can be achieved, when compared with other power control algorithms. Furthermore, the algorithm works well for nonreal-time terminals when other real-time terminals employ the target-tracking power control. It can also be extended to cases where maximum power constraint is imposed and soft handoff is executed.