A novel UL power control scheme for a digital cellular repeater

Abstract

The ideal application scenario of a digital repeater is to let the repeater be operated as a transparent node in the radio access network, which means the repeater has to keep a linear gain all the time when it is forwarding data among base stations and handsets. For a handset in a cellular network, its UL transmitted power may be dramatically fluctuated by the closed loop power control to meet the required signal quality and to compensate the propagation loss due to wireless channel. When a repeater is serving the handset, it may not be able to keep a linear gain in dealing with such variant received signal strength and sometimes results in transmitting over-powered UL signal to desensitize base station reception and even to interfere the base station. In this paper, we propose a novel power control scheme, which is to adaptively adjust the maximum UL output power of a digital cellular repeater to cope with the problem mentioned above. Field test results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.