Power control and capacity of spread spectrum wireless networks

Transmit power control is a central technique for resource allocation and i nterference management in spread-spectrum wireless networks. With the incre asing popularity of spread-spectrum as a multiple access technique, there h as been significant research in the area in recent years. While power contr ol has been considered traditionally as a means to counteract the harmful e ffect of channel fading, the more general emerging view is that it is a fle xible mechanism to provide quality of service to individual users. In this paper, we will review the main threads of ideas and results in the recent d evelopment of this area, with a bias towards issues that have been the focu s of our own research. For different receivers of varying complexity, we st udy both questions about optimal power control as well as the problem of ch aracterizing the resulting network capacity. Although spread-spectrum commu nications has been traditionally viewed as a physical-layer subject, we arg ue that by suitable abstraction, many control and optimization problems wit h interesting structure can be formulated at the network layer. (C) 1999 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.