On the usefulness of outer-loop power control with successive interference cancellation

Multiuser detection (MUD) performance can be significantly better than the conventional matched filter receiver in CDMA systems. Further, since optimal MUD is exponentially complex, research has mainly focused on suboptimal approaches such as successive interference cancellation (SIC). SIC requires a geometric distribution of received powers to achieve equal performance for all received signals. We propose a power control scheme for SIC to achieve this profile (or the profile corresponding to any desired and achievable set of error rates) based on frame-error rate (FER) or bit-error rate (BER). Specifically, we derive the relationship between received power and BER for linear SIC and show that for unlimited mobile powers, a deterministic distributed BER-based outer-loop power control drives the received powers to the optimal power profile. The convergence of the deterministic BER-based algorithm is examined in the absence of inner loop power control errors. The simulated performance of a stochastic version of this algorithm is examined using instantaneous FER measurements. The stochastic algorithm is shown to provide unbiased estimates of the true power updates and converge to the optimal power vector provided the mobiles have unlimited power. We consider power limits for specific mobiles and find that individual mobile limits do not affect the performance of other signals. We examine the impact of system loading, multiple FER targets, error correction, and inner loop power control error on the performance of the algorithm.