A Power Control Algorithm for 3G WCDMA System

Loutfi Nuaymi*, Xavier Lagrange*, Philippe Godlewski** *ENST Bretagne, 2, Rue de la Chataigneraie, B.P. 78, Cesson Svign 35512 Cedex, FRANCE **ENST, 46, Rue Barrault, Paris 75634 Cedex 13, FRANCE e-mail: loutfi.nuaymi@enst-bretagne.fr, xavier.lagrange@enst-bretagne.fr, godlewski@enst.fr

ABSTRACT- In this paper, an evolution of the power control algorithm is proposed for the third-generation WCDMA system. The algorithm is based on a modification of the transmitted power update step size. Instead of the presently-suggested fixed value, the step size is modified dynamically in order to guarantee more adapted power variations. The proposed algorithm is justified and a general form of this algorithm is presented. It is then studied in a simple simulation, which allows useful discussion and evaluation of the proposed algorithm. Important elements of the proposed algorithm are highlighted. I. INTRODUCTION Power control (PC) is an essential function of cellular CDMA systems. WCDMA ([1], [2]), initially the European and Japanese common proposal for thirdgeneration IMT-2000, is the third generation cellular system (3G) of the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) forum. For WCDMA, power control is defined in [3] for the FDD (Frequency Division Duplex) system and [4] for the TDD (Time Division Duplex) system. Power control in WCDMA system is reviewed for both FDD and TDD systems in [5], where details of power control are given for the ordinary mode, the soft handover and the compressed mode. In this paper, we start by reviewing power control in WCDMA system then we propose a PC algorithm for WCDMA. The ASPC (Adaptive-Step Power Control) Algorithm uses the bits allocated to PC in WCDMA. This algorithm may introduce some performance amelioration, expressed by a capacity increase. The proposed algorithm is simulated and compared to the two algorithms of the 3GPP specification [3], already mentioned. The parameters of our algorithm are discussed. Although the implementation question is not directly addressed in our paper, the results and the comparisons obtained may be used for performance evaluation. A discussion of the results and conclusions are given in the last section

II. POWER CONTROL IN WCDMA SYSTEM The WCDMA air interface is organized in frames of 10 ms duration. A frame contains 15 time slots and each slot includes one PC command (up or down), which gives a PC update rate of 1500 b/s. The transmitted power has a fixed value during a given time slot. Power control in WCDMA is a closed-loop PC which is a combination of outer and inner closed loop control (see Figure 1). The inner (also called fast) closed loop PC adjusts the transmitted power in order to keep the received Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) equal to a given target. This SIR target is fixed according to the received BLER (Block Error Rate) or BER (Bit Error Rate). The setting of the SIR target is done by the outer loop PC, which is part the Radio Resource Control Layer (Layer 3), in order to match the required BLER ([3]). Outer loop PC update frequency is 10-100 Hz ([1]). The BLER target is a function of the service that is carried. Ensuring that the lowest possible SIR target is used results in greater network capacity. The inner closed-loop PC measures the received quality, defined as the received Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) and sends commands to the transmitter (i.e., the mobile in the case of uplink) for the transmitted power update. In order to estimate the received SIR, the receiver estimates the received power of the connection to be power controlled and the received interference. The obtained SIR estimate, noted SIRest, is then used by the receiver to generate PC commands according to Algorithm 1 or 2 of the 3GPP specification [3]. In Algorithm 1 of [3], the transmitted power is updated at each time slot (10/15 ms). It is increased or decreased by a fixed value: - if SIRest > SIRtarget then the TPC command to transmit is "0", requesting a transmit power decrease; - if SIRest < SIRtarget then the TPC command to transmit is "1", requesting a transmit power increase. Algorithm 2 of [3] is a slight variant of Algorithm 1 where the transmitted powers may be updated each five time slots, which simulates smaller power update steps.

BERtarget

SIRtarget SIRtarget estimation PC decision Radio channel Receiver block SIRest BERest

Inner loop

Outer loop

Fig. 1. Power control in WCDMA system. In the receiver block, the received SIR and BER are estimated and used respectively for the inner-loop and the outer-loop.

The power control step size is a parameter of the fast (inner) closed-loop PC. In the case of the uplink, it is equal to 1 or 2 dB in WCDMA system. Values smaller than 1 dB can be emulated by taking larger PC update periods (Algorithm 2). The power update step size may be chosen according to the average mobile speed and other operating environment parameters. For the downlink, power update step sizes of the same magnitude are proposed. The authors of [6] suggest the coding of the power control command on 2, 3 or 4 bits instead of one (which leads to a power gain scheduling). The variation is made according to the performance of the system, defined as the total number of blocked calls. Power control steps range from 0.25 to 1.5 dB. Results show that the average SIR is higher. The modification of the proposed controller, based on a simple comparison between the estimated SIR and the target SIR is studied in [7]. The new controller decides the PC command based on history of the PC commands and errors. Results show significant ameliorations of the quality of the transmission. The performance of the closed-loop power control of FDD WCDMA system is evaluated in [8] for the two algorithms proposed in [3]. The evaluation is done for different values of the SIR estimation standard deviation error. A SIR estimation scheme is proposed. With this estimation, simulation results shows that Algorithm 1 outperforms Algorithm 2.

In [9], the PC algorithm of WCDMA and proposed PC schemes are simulated and compared. Received power level-based PC shows to have better performance for some cases. Specific power control of TDD systems is studied in [10] and [11]. Power control of US 3G system cdma2000 is reviewed and simulated in [12]. Three schemes of power control during soft handover, for the downlink, are studied in [13]: balanced power control ([3]), site selection diversity power control ([3]) and an hybrid scheme combining the two latters. The case where each of the three schemes give better performance are outlined.

III. SYSTEM MODEL Uplink of FDD WCDMA 3G system is considered. In a FDD-CDMA system, a physical channel is defined by its code and its frequency. The methods proposed in this paper could be applied to downlink and TDD systems after some slight adaptations. Power control is only applied at Layer 1 (inner closed-loop PC). Circuitswitched systems (e.g., voice service) are considered. A rather simple simulation model is used. This allows comparisons between the PC algorithms. A maximal transmitted power limitation is considered. For each mobile, the best-received base station is selected as its corresponding one. Mobiles mobility, communications starts and ends are also simulated. A discrete event simulation is considered.

At a given instant, M mobiles are transmitting information sharing a common radio channel (CDMA). Each mobile should communicate with one of the B base stations. The index of the base to which mobile m is assigned is am . A mobile is connected to the bestreceived power level BS, which is not always the closest one due to fadings. Mobile m transmitted power is pm and the link gain from mobile m to base b is noted gbm , so matrix G = (gbm) is of size (B x M). Mobile m received SIR on base b, noted m,b , is then given by: m,b = g bm p m
j =1; j m

step by an adaptive step in the inner closed-loop one-bit (of information) PC of 3G WCDMA systems. We call this variant the Adaptive-Step Power Control (ASPC). It is based on the following principle. If the transmitter detects several simultaneous up commands, the step is increased. This is also done for several simultaneous down commands. The update step is decreased if an alternative succession of up and down appears, showing that the update step is probably too large. Using this basic principle, the algorithm may have many forms.

(1) TSn TSn+1 TSp

g bj p j + n b

where nb is the receiver noise, also called thermal noise, at base b. The received SIR of mobile m on its assigned BS is noted m, so one can write: m = m, am . A mobile is in outage state when its SIR falls below 0. Paging or synchronization channels are not included in the simulation. Performance of the algorithm is evaluated with the outage probability, which is the probability that the received SIR falls below the fixed threshold. Call dropping is not considered in our simulations. More details about the simulation are given in Section V.

...
nq Time slots

..........
nq PC commands

: PC bit(s). One PC command

Fig. 2. Transmitted power update of inner closed-loop power control (PC) in WCDMA: one PC command is transmitted per time slot. This PC command is transmitted on one or more PC bit (see TS 25.211). The time slot duration is 0.67 ms (10ms / 15).

IV. ADAPTIVE-STEP POWER CONTROL FOR A 3G CDMA NETWORK Received quality-based power control outperforms received power level-based power control ([15]). The two power control algorithms of WCDMA described in Section II are based on received quality level. The transmitted power range may be up to more than 70 dB. For the present version of power control algorithm of WCDMA, transmitted power update step is around 1 dB. Frequent variations occur in the mobile network due to communications starts and ends, to mobiles movements and to propagation channel changes. Radio channel modification may be due to multipath and to obstacles movements. Thus, a fast power control is needed. The aim of the algorithm proposed in this paper is to converge faster than the present WCDMA power control algorithms. In WCDMA System, one PC command (up or down) is transmitted per time slot as shown in Figure 2. The value of the fixed step may be too small or too large for the transmitted power adjustment needed. In the following, we propose to replace the fixed power update

Generally, the algorithm works as follows. The 0 , expressed in dB. The APSC works in up or down commands as in the case of WCDMA algorithms with the difference that the power update step may change in some cases. These cases are given in the following: L WKH XSGDWH VWHS LV PXOWLSOLHG E\  ZKHQ n1 successive up commands are received; LL WKH XSGDWH VWHS LV PXOWLSOLHG E\  ZKHQ n0 successive down commands are received; LLL WKLV YDOXH LV GLYLGHG E\  ZKHQ WKH SRZHU XSGDWH command sequence is an alternate sequence of n01 up and down commands (i.e., for a received sequence updown-up-down or down-up-down-up, if n01 is equal to 4). 7KXV WKH DOJRULWKP KDV VHYHQ SDUDPHWHUV 0    n1, n0, and n01. Using the above-described algorithm, we show some results for the adaptive step power control algorithm. An example of application of the adaptive step principle is considered.
LQLWLDO YDOXH RI WKH SRZHU XSGDWH VWHS LV

V. SIMULATION RESULTS The numerical hypothesis of the simulated system model for the mobile network are now given. The ASPC Algorithm is evaluated in simulation and compared to the power control Algorithms 1 and 2 of WCDMA (see Section II). The simulated service is 8 kbps circuitswitched service with voice activity 100%. Class 3 mobile stations are considered. The maximum transmitted power is 24 dBm and the minimum transmitted power is -50 dBm as specified in [16]. The receiver thermal noise for base station is -103 dBm. A receiver thermal noise is considered in order to have absolute values for transmitted powers computed by the PC algorithms (see Formula (1)). The initial transmitted powers have random value between the minimum value and 10% of the (real) value of maximum transmitted power. In 3G proposed systems, the outer-loop sets the SIR target. In this paper, we consider a unique SIR target for all links, where we assume that all communications have the same data rate. The target SIR for all mobiles, on the uplink, is 0 = 17 dB. A perfect estimation of the received SIR is assumed. A CDMA system with 25 BS ( 5x5 ) is considered. The base stations are placed on a rectangular grid. The side of the average square cell is 200m. Mobiles are uniformly distributed. The link gain between mobile j and base i is modeled as gij = cs / d4ij where coefficient cs corresponds to obstacles (shadow fading) and dij is the mobile-to-base distance. Coefficient cs is a zero-mean log-normal random variable whose standard deviation is =6dB. In our simulations, we consider the following $63& DOJRULWKP SDUDPHWHUV 0  G%    10; n1= n0 = n01 = 2 for the simulations of Figures 3 and 5. Average values are evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations for 500 independent configurations (mobiles distributions). Admission control is not addressed in this work, i.e., an admit-all policy is considered, the outage probability being the performance evaluation criterion. The association of the proposed algorithm with an admission control policy is an interesting topic of research. We first consider a simulation with fixed-position mobiles. The number of mobiles in the simulated zone is 450 (18 mobiles per cell in average). The update step of WCDMA PC algorithms is 0 = 1 dB. The average outage percentage is the percentage of mobiles whose SIR is smaller than the SIR target. It is plotted as a function of the iteration step in Figures 3 and 4, in order to discuss the convergence speed of PC algorithms.

In Figure 3, we see that Algorithms 1 and 2 of WCDMA have practically the same plots for this simulation environment. We see that the ASPC converges faster than Algorithm 1 of WCDMA at the price of some added instability. For the model and other hypothesis considered, the average number of iterations needed is divided by three approximately, with regard to the algorithms of WCDMA system. It is here noted that simulations show that smaller values of   DQG  OHDG to more important instability of the ASPC algorithm.

Average outage percentage 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0

10

20

30 40 Iteration number

50

60

Fig. 3 : Convergence speed of PC algorithms. The average outage percentage is plotted for the ASPC (solid) and for Algorithms 1 (x) and 2 (+) of WCDMA as a function of the number of iteration steps. The ASPC converges faster at the price of some added instability.

In Figure 4, the parameters of the ASPC algorithm 0  G%     n1= n0 = n01 = 3. The convergence is not faster while the instability is higher. 7KH UHVXOWV DUH QRW EHWWHU ZLWK VPDOOHU YDOXHV RI    DQG   ,W LV WKHQ GHFLGHG DW WKLV OHYHO WR WDNH RQO\ WKH YDOXH 2 for n1, n0 and n01 . We then analyze the behaviour of the ASPC when the terminals are moving in an event-driven simulation. Call arrivals to the network are modeled as a Poisson process and the call duration is taken to be an exponentially distributed random variable with mean value 120s. The mobiles speeds have a uniform distribution between zero and 120 km/h, i.e., the average mobile speed is 60 km/h. The outage probability is plotted as a function of the average number of mobiles per cell in Figure 5.
DUH

Average outage percentage 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 0

VI. CONCLUSIONS Power control in 3G WCDMA System is studied in this paper. We propose an evolution of the power control algorithm of the third-generation WCDMA system. The proposed algorithm is based on an adaptive modification of the transmitted power update step size. We notice that the Adaptive-Step Power Control Algorithm, which could be easily implemented, is an interesting variant of the one-bit command PC of WCDMA System. We show some results of the ASPC Algorithm for a given numerical parameters set of the algorithm. The quicker convergence of the proposed ASPC (with regard to the present version of power control in WCDMA) may give a capacity increase. The important parameters of ASPC Algorithm are the step modification formula and the sequences that trigger step modification. The general form of the algorithm allows further studies according to specific mobile network environments. A convenient or optimal selection of the parameters according to the mobile network environment (mobiles speeds characteristics, other statistics) is left for future research. A more general efficient coding of the PC command bits is another interesting topic of research.

10

20

30 40 Iteration number

50

60

Fig. 4 : Convergence speed for a different parameters set for the ASPC (    compared.

n1=n0=n01=3). The outage

probability of ASPC (solid) and Alg 1 (x) of WCDMA are

Outage Probability 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 11

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12

13 14 15 Average Load (Erlang/cell)

16

17

Fig. 5 : Outage probability is plotted for the ASPC (o) and Algorithm 1 of WCDMA (+) as a function of the average number of mobiles per cell.

The relatively high values of outage probabilities are due to the 'admit-all' policy. A convenient admission policy, which could be associated with power control, would lead to better performances. Yet, Figure 5 shows the amelioration due to the use of the ASPC algorithm. The faster convergence of the ASPC leads to a smaller outage probability, as noticed in Figure 5. For the same outage probability, the ASPC leads to a greater average number of mobiles per cell and thus increases the network capacity.

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