Efficient power control is of great importance in the design of high c
apacity cellular radio systems. Optimum power control scheme, in the s
ense that it minimises the outage probability, has been fully investig
ated for FDMA/TDMA cellular systems. The authors propose optimum power
control and several centralised power control algorithms for CDMA cel
lular systems. Simulation results indicate that the optimum power cont
rol scheme outperforms the perfect average power control algorithm by
similar to 1.9dB under the IS-95 defined radio condition.