Analysis of power control in satellite-based WCDMA Links

The 3GPP Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) waveform which was developed primarily for terrestrial cellular applications has also been adopted for satellite platforms. Power control (PC) is an essential feature of WCDMA systems and is used in multiuser WCDMA systems to allocate the minimum needed power for each user link and maximize system throughput. The effectiveness of PC depends on the accuracy of channel estimation, PC update rate and the latency in PC loop due to propagation delay in the channel which can be large in satellite-based WCDMA systems. This paper analyzes the impact of latency and other factors on the effectiveness of PC over a variety of satellite channels and a mix of users for both single user and netted communications.