OOPC: an adaptive power control scheme for packet radio networks

The near/far phenomenon in direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS) systems that do not employ any power control strategy degrades their throughput performance. A redeeming feature of this problem though, is that under heavy traffic conditions it can in fact improve the maximum achievable throughput of the network. This paper develops a simple adaptive uplink power control scheme exploiting this insight for spread spectrum packet radio networks that is shown to improve throughput performance. This scheme, referred to as \´on-off power control\´ (OOPC), utilizes packet collision information to determine the power control operation in a distributed fashion. Additionally, an evaluation of the OOPC performance when "centralized load sensing" is used is also presented. The impact of channel fading is included in the performance analysis by modeling packet transmission to be Nakagami faded.