Optimization of Uplink Power Control Parameters in Wireless Cellular Networks

In both 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G New Radio (NR) systems, uplink power control (UPC) is a key feature of radio resource management to balance the inter-cell interference and guarantee the network performance, especially for physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH). In this paper, a methodology for optimizing UPC parameters is presented via network utility maximization (NUM). The network utility is defined as the sum of user utilities and is proven to be a concave function towards the two most important UPC parameters, i.e., nominal power level and channel path-loss compensation factor. Each cell optimizes its own UPC parameters semi-autonomously with only exchanging a few key variables via inter-cell coordination. Under the assumption of best effort traffic, results via system-level simulation show that network throughput performance with the proposed UPC mechanism is significantly improved when compared with typical fixed UPC parameter settings.