Power control scheme to combat cell breathing phenomenon in 3G mobile systems

With the coming about of the 3rd Generation (3G) systems, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) technology, so came with it 'cell breathing'. This phenomenon is directly linked to the codependent of capacity and coverage. The greater the level of influx of users within the cell, the higher the interference and hence the lower the cell coverage becomes. This dynamic behaviour makes network planning and optimisation a complex task. Our paper proposes a power control algorithm to guarantee services for the area of a cell as the load increases. The proposed algorithm reduces the power transmitted from active users for each iteration of the algorithm. This will enable the system to have constant cell coverage. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the traditional power control scheme that tends to increase the power of the users as the load increases to retrieve the target Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR).