QoS guarantee and power distribution for soft handoff connections in cellular CDMA downlinks

A two-phase power distribution scheme for supporting quality-of-service (QoS) and best effort traffic is proposed. We first formulate the power distribution for QoS traffic as an optimization problem so that the number of simultaneously transmitting connections is maximized. Optimum power distribution is difficult to implement in practice due to both the computational complexity and the requirement for global information about the mobile station (MS) locations, connection channel conditions, and traffic load in the system. We then propose a heuristic scheme of power distribution for soft handoff (SHO) connections. The full scheme includes an initial power distribution (IPD) and a power distribution adjustment (PDA). IPD allocates BS power resource based on the channel condition of each individual connection, while PDA further coordinates the power distribution between neighboring base stations (BSs) in order to accommodate more connections. The proposed power distribution scheme can achieve a capacity close to that of the optimum power distribution, while providing much higher transmission throughput for best effort data traffic. The proposed power distribution scheme can be applied to existing SHO schemes for efficient BS power resource usage. The scheme does not require global information, and its implementation can be further simplified by performing IPD only with slight performance degradation.