Behavior and performance of power controlled IS-95 reverse-link under soft handoff

From our study of the power controlled reverse-link behavior, we observe that the received signals from multiple links under soft-Handoff and power control are not independent but negatively correlated. The cause of the negative correlation are investigated through analysis and simulation. It is shown that due to the negative correlation, the required signal to interference ratio (SIR) to achieve an given post selector frame-error rate (FER) can be up to 2 dB less than previous estimated based on the independent assumption. Such an observation also leads to a more accurate reverse-link capacity estimate. Finally, it is pointed out that such performance is practically attainable with an appropriate power control algorithm