Joint rate and power adaptation for radio resource management in uplink wideband code division multiple access systems

The benefits of adaptive joint power control and rate allocation for uplink transmission in a wideband code division multiple access cellular system are investigated. Closed-loop power control (CLPC), to adaptively adjust the transmit power, has the effect of maintaining a target signal-to-interference ratio and bit error rate (BER) performance. On the other hand, rate adaptation requires less transmit power, although the BER performance may be poorer. The authors differentiate the power update interval from the data rate update interval, analyse and evaluate the performance of two joint rate/power adaptation algorithms in a fading environment: optimal spreading factor-power control (OSF-PC) and greedy rate packing-power control (GRP-PC). Numerical results show that GRP-PC exhibits superior throughput performance compared with other three adaptation schemes. CLPC alone exhibits throughput and BER performances comparable to those of the OSF-PC scheme, but consumes a significantly higher amount of transmit power. Rate adaptation only is not efficient in enhancing throughput, but its power consumption is minimal.