Uplink power control and interference management for the support of QoS applications

The next generation of cellular networks (Long Term Evolution) uses SC-FDMA (Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access) on the uplink. In SC-FDMA, the uplink resources assigned to a user are called Resource Blocks (RBs) each of which consists of a set of consecutive subcarriers spanning all symbols available for data. Since at most one User Equipment (UE) is assigned to each RB then uplink transmissions within a sector are orthogonal. However, the transmission is affected by intersector interference since users in adjacent sectors may also have been assigned to the same RB. We assume that, within a site (i.e., basestation) interference cancellation is used to address this interference problem. However, for sectors across sites, interference management must be used to ensure efficient utilization of network resources. In this paper we investigate the issues of power allocation and interference management for the LTE uplink. In particular, we address the case in which QoS guarantees are made for uplink connections.