Abstract

In this thesis, we propose two power control algorithms, one signal-to-interference (SIR) based and the other bit-error-rate (BER) based. The proposed algorithms are of first order and have been devised for use as distributed power control algorithms for the uplink channel in wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA). The main feature of the proposed algorithms is that they use a nonlinear power update function which helps in improving the convergence speed of these algorithms. We study the convergence of the proposed algorithms and show that they always converge to a fixed point. We examine the algorithms in time varying multipath Rayleigh fading environments with a wide range of terminal mobilities. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithms converge faster than existing power control algorithms, including the 3GPP standard algorithms. We also demonstrate that the proposed algorithms result in gains in the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) between 1.0 dB to 1.5 dB for the SIR-based algorithm and about 1.0 dB for the BER-based algorithm, all relative to the 3GPP standard power control algorithms.