Performance of Uplink Fractional Power Control in UTRAN LTE

UTRAN long term evolution is currently being standardized in 3GPP with the aim of more than twice the capacity over high-speed packet access. The chosen multiple access for uplink is single carrier FDMA, which avoids the intra-cell interference typical of CDMA systems, but it is still sensitive to inter-cell interference. As a result, the role of the power control becomes decisive to provide the required SINR, while controlling at the same time the interference caused to neighboring cells. This is the target of the fractional power control (FPC) algorithm lately approved in 3GPP. This paper evaluates in detail the impact of a FPC scheme on the SINR and interference distributions in order to provide a sub-optimal configuration tuned for both interference- and noise-limited scenarios.