Uplink Power Control in LTE –
Overview and Performance
Principles and Benefits of Utilizing rather than Compensating for SINR Variations
Arne Simonsson and Anders Furuskär
Wireless Access Networks, Ericsson Research
[arne.simonsson, anders.furuskar]@ericsson.com
Abstract—Uplink power control is a key radio resource
management function. It is typically used to maximize the power
of the desired received signals while limiting the generated
interference. This paper presents the 3GPP long Term Evolution
(LTE) power control mechanism, and compares its performance
to two reference mechanisms. The LTE power control
mechanism constitutes of a closed loop component operating
around an open loop point of operation. Specifically, the open
loop component has a parameterized fractional path loss
compensation factor, enabling a trade-off between cell edge
bitrate and cell capacity. The closed-loop component can be
limited to compensate for long-term variations, enabling fast
channel quality variations to be utilized by scheduling and link
adaptation. Simulation results indicate that the LTE power
control mechanism is advantageous compared to reference
mechanisms using full path loss compensation and SINR
balancing. The fractional pathloss compensation can improve the
cell-edge bitrate and/or the capacity with up to 20% while at the
same time battery life time is improved. The fast SINR balancing
closed loop mechanism performs poorly at high load since it does
not utilize the link adaptation and the full link performance
capability in LTE.
E-UTRA; LTE; power control; uplink
I. INTRODUCTION
Power control is a crucial radio network function in cellular
systems. This paper describes the LTE power control for the
Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH) [1], discusses
different applications of it, and evaluates its performance for
different parameter settings. The focus is on the benefit of
fractional pathloss compensation, first proposed in [2]. A
performance comparison to an SINR balancing power control
scheme is also included.
The paper is outlined as follows. In Section II power
control is discussed both in general and specifically for LTE as
well as the studied power control principle. The simulation
assumptions are described in Section III followed by results in
Section IV. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section V.
II. POWER CONTROL
Power control refers to setting output power levels of
transmitters, base stations in downlink and mobile stations in
uplink, with an objective to improve system capacity, coverage
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and user quality (data rate or voice quality), and to reduce
power consumption. To reach these objectives, power-control
mechanisms typically aim at maximizing the received power of
desired signals, while limiting the generated interference.
In the downlink, a simple and efficient power control
strategy, used in most recent system concepts, is to transmit
with a constant output power. Often the maximum base station
power is used. Variations in channel conditions and
interference levels are adapted to by means of scheduling and
link adaptation rather than with power control. This strategy
obviously maximizes the received power. The generated
interference power is instantaneously high, but the interference
energy generated for a given amount of data transferred is
minimized by maximizing the data rate, thus minimizing the
transmission time, through scheduling and link adaptation. The
LTE uplink power control may be considered as a means to
apply this downlink concept in the uplink direction.
A. Uplink Power Control in LTE
The LTE uplink is orthogonal, meaning that there is, at
least in the ideal case, no interference between users in the
same cell but only interference between cells. The amount of
interference generated to neighbor cells depends, among other
things, on the mobile-terminal position, or more specifically
the pathgain from the terminal to these cells. Terminals close to
neighbor cells generate more interference than terminals far
away. For a given generated interference level in a neighbor
cell, terminals far away from that cell may hence transmit with
a higher power than terminals near the cell. Further, there is a
correlation between being close to the serving cell and being
far away from neighbor cells.
All these characteristics are utilized in the LTE uplink
power control. The orthogonal LTE uplink allows multiplexing
of terminals with different received uplink power within the
same cell. On the short term scale this means that peaks in
multipath fading may be utilized through scheduling and link
adaptation to increase the data rates, rather than compensated
for by reducing power. On the long-term, the received power
target is further set based on the pathgain to the serving cell, so
that terminals that generate little interference may have a larger
received power target.
The LTE uplink power control is based on both signal
strength measurements done by the terminal it self (open-loop
1
power control) as well as measurements by the base station, TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETRS
used to generate transmit power control commands that are Traffic Models
subsequently fed back to the terminals as part of the downlink
control signaling (closed-loop power control). The fractional User distribution Uniform
path loss compensation is done in the open-loop but controlled On-off with activity factor f ;
Data generation
with a factor Į by the network [1]. In more detail, the open- 20, 40, 60, 80, 100%
loop component of the LTE power control is defined by: Radio Network Models

Distance attenuation L = 35.3+37.6·log(d), d = distance in meters

PSD = P0 + Į • PL [dB] (1) Penetration loss 20dB

Shadow fading Log-normal, 8 dB standard deviation

where PSD is the transmitted power spectral density, PL is the
estimated pathloss, and P0 is a parameter used to control the Multipath fading SCM, suburban macro
SNR target (see [3] for this relationship). Hexagonal grid, 3-sector sites, 57 sectors in
Cell layout
total
There are several features in LTE to support closed loop
control [1]. A fast 2-bit Transmit Power Control (TPC) f(i) that Cell radius 167m (500m inter-site distance)
can be sent in each uplink scheduling grant to the UE System Models
controlling each subframe i enabling up to 1kHz update rate. 0.2 & 10MHz at 2GHz
This TPC is relatively to the open loop setting and can be either Spectrum allocation
1&50 resource blocks, 12&600 subcarriers
accumulated as in UTRA or absolute. There is also Transport UE power class (Pmax) 250mW
Format (TF) selection dependent power offset ǻTF(TF(i)) where
ǻTF is a table configured by higher layers with one entry for Max antenna gain 15dBi
each transport format TF. This can also be used to control the Modulation and coding QPSK & 16QAM, continious coding
power each scheduling grant by scheduling smaller transport
28% for reference signals and L1/L2 control
formats reducing the transmitted power. In addition to this P0 Overhead
channels (5 symbols per TTI for data)
can be individually controlled for each UE P0UE enabling a
Receiver MMSE with 2-branch receive diversity
slow power control adjustment.

B. Power Control Algorithms Studied in this Paper
A set of simple basic uplink power control principles are
studied. They represent different usage and parameter settings
of the LTE power control mechanism.
1) No Power Control (No PC)
Fixed transmission power, the UE power is set to P = Pmax,
where Pmax is the maximum UE power. Used as a reference
case. This can be applied in LTE by setting Į=0 and P0 = Pmax.
2) Open Loop Power Control, Į=1
Open loop with a fixed received SNR target. Į=1 and P0 =
SNRtarget +Pnoise, where Pnoise is the noise power level, SNRtarget
is a targeted received power level relative to the noise floor.
Note that the desired SNRtarget with this algorithm must include
a margin for expected interference. Values of SNRtarget between
0 and 30dB have been simulated.
3) Open Loop Power Control, Į=0.7
Open loop with fractional path loss compensation. Į = 0.7
and P0 = SNRtarget +Pnoise. All the compensation factors Į in the
LTE standard (0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, & 0.9) have been
simulated in combination with SNRtarget between 0 and 30dB.
Į=0.7 was found to give a good trade-off between cell-edge
bitrate and capacity, as will be shown in the results.
4) Closed Loop Power Control
Fast SINR balancing closed loop. This is based on
algorithm 2, but with individual UE specific compensation
factors targeting a desired effective SNR; SINRtarget. The open
loop component is set as algorithm 2, Į=1 and P0 = SNRtarget
+Pnoise , where P0 defines the initial power only. Effective SNR
(after antenna combination) including interference is measured
for each UE and compared with the desired SINRtarget. The
difference is adjusted by sending TPC to the UE. An ideal
closed loop is simulated resulting in an ‘upper bound’ for this
type of algorithm. In line with this assumption perfect
interference knowledge and an ideal update rate are assumed.
The closed loop compensation is repeated until power levels
converge.
III. SIMULATION ASSUMPTIONS AND MEASURES
Models and simulation parameters are according to the
3GPP evaluation criteria case 1 [4] including sub-carrier
modeling of OFDM and Spatial Channel Model (SCM). A
selection of simulation parameters is listed in Table 1.
Handover margin, delay and measurement error are modeled
by randomly selecting among cells within 3 dB from the best
based on downlink path gain excluding multipath fading.
Control channels are assumed to be error-free, but their
overhead is taken into account. Note that the presented results
are for relative comparison only and do not give correct
absolute LTE performance. No measurement or power setting
error is included.
Static snapshot simulations have been used. In each
iteration of the simulation, terminals are randomly positioned
in the system area, and the radio channel between each base
station and terminal antenna pair is calculated according to the
propagation and fading models. To study different system load
levels, terminals are randomly selected to be transmitting with
an activity factor f ranging from 20 to 100%. In active cells
transmitting users are selected independently of channel
quality. Based on the channel realizations and the active
interferers, a signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) is

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 100 100

90 90

80 80

70 70

60 60
C.D.F. [%]

C.D.F. [%]
50 50

40 40

30 30
No PC No PC
20 OL PC SNRtarget :8dB α :1 20 OL PC SNRtarget :8dB α :1
OL PC SNRtarget :5dB α :0.7 OL PC SNRtarget :5dB α :0.7
10 10
CL PC SINRtarget:0dB CL PC SINRtarget:0dB
0 0
-20 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25
Effective SNR [dB] Active Radio Link Bitrate [Mbps]

Figure 1. Effective SNR distribution. 10MHz & f=100%, optimized for cell- Figure 2. Bitrate distribution. 10MHz & f=100%, optimized for cell-edge
edge bitrate bitrate.

calculated for each link and receive antenna. Then, using a

18
receiver model, an effective SNR (after antenna combining) is

Active Radio Link Bitrate (5th perc and mean) [Mbps]

No PC
calculated per resource block. Following this, using the mutual 16 OL PC SNRtarget:8dB α :1
information model of [5], the effective SNR values are mapped OL PC SNRtarget:5dB α :0.7
to active radio link bitrates Ru, for each active user u. Note that 14
CL PC SINRtarget:0dB
Ru is the bitrate that user u gets when scheduled. Active base 12
stations and users differ between iterations, and statistics are
collected over a large number of iterations. For each activity 10

factor, the served traffic per cell T(f) is calculated as the sum of 8
the active radio link bitrates for the active users:
6

U(f)
T(f) = Ȉu=1 Ru / Ncell (2) 4

where, U(f) is the total number of active users for activity
factor f, and Ncell=57, the number of cells in the system. This
assumes that user are scheduled an equal amount of time. The
mean and the 5th percentile of the active radio link bitrate are
used as measures of average and cell-edge user quality
respectively. Note that as the activity factor increases,
individual user bitrates decrease because of increased
interference and thereby decreased SINR. The served traffic
however increases as the number of active users increase.
IV. NUMERICAL RESULTS
The power control algorithms have been evaluated in three
different scenarios, a wideband (10MHz) allocation targeting
either maximizing mean or cell-edge performance, and a
narrowband (0.2MHz) allocation.
A. Targeting High Cell-Edge Bitrate in 10MHz
10 MHz have been simulated, modeling a high data rate
service where all 50 resource blocks are scheduled to a single
user in each cell. Power control targets have been scanned to
find the parameter setting giving highest cell edge bitrate at full
load (f=100%). The best setting was found to be:
• SNRtarget=8dB for open loop with Į = 1,
• SNRtarget = 5dB for open loop with Į = 0.7,
2
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Served Traffic [Mbps]
Figure 3. Mean (circles) and cell-edge (triangles) bitrate vs served traffic,
10MHz scheduled optimized for cell-edge bitrate
• SINRtarget = 0dB for closed loop.
The resulting effective SNR and bitrate (Ru) distributions
are shown in Fig.1 and Fig.2 respectively. The fast ideal closed
loop balances all users on the target of 0dB except for the 5th
percent worst. This shows that the selected target is the optimal
for cell-edge bitrate as it is defined to be measured at the 5th
percentile. The open loop algorithms also decrease the variance
of the SNR compared to the reference without power control.
Since the open loops do not compensate for interference and
fast fading there is still a significant variance of effective SNR.
Note that the median SNR with the open loop algorithms are
higher than with the closed loop and in the range of the
reference without power control.
In Fig.3 the resulting cell-edge and average active radio
link bitrate are shown as a function of the served traffic per cell
(T). The markers are the simulated activity factors (f). Note that
for the closed loop the cell-edge and average bitrates are almost
equal. All power control algorithms improve the cell edge
bitrate significantly compared to using no power control.
However, the SINR balancing closed loop algorithm results in

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 15 18

Active Radio Link Bitrate (5th perc and mean) [Mbps]

14 16

13
14

12
Served Traffic [Mbps]

12
11 No PC
10
OL PC SNRtarget:20dB α :1
10
OL PC SNRtarget:15dB α :0.7
8
9 CL PC SINRtar get :13dB
6
8

4
7
OL PC α :1
6 OL PC α :0.7 2
CL PC
5 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
SNRtar get /SINRtar get [dB] Served Traffic [Mbps]

Figure 4. Served traffic per cell for different SNR and SINR targets. Figure 5. Mean (circles) and cell-edge (triangles) bitrate vs served traffic.
10MHz and f=100% 10MHz scheduled optimized for mean bitrate

low served traffic. And even though the 5th percentile bitrate is
100
highest at 100% activity (right most markers) it performs worse No PC
in general. This type of SINR balancing closed loop is good for 90 OL PC SNRtarget:20dB α :1
circuit switched radio channels but does not perform well for 80 OL PC SNRtarget:15dB α :0.7
packet switched channels with link adaptation such as PUSCH CL PC SINRtar get :13dB
70
in LTE. The link adaptation range is not utilized as seen in
Fig.2. C.D.F. [%]
60

As seen in Fig. 3, the two open loop algorithms improve the 50

cell edge bitrate almost equally. This improvement comes at 40

the cost of average bitrate reduction. The fractional
30
compensation open loop performs in general best with the
same cell edge performance as with full compensation but 20
around 20% higher average bitrate. This is also seen in Fig.2 10
where the fractional open loop performs equal to or better than
the fully compensating open loop. 0
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25
Power [W]

B. Targeting High Capacity in 10MHz Figure 6. Transmission power distribution. 10MHz & f=100%. Optimized for
mean bitrate.
As shown above, utilizing mobiles in good radio conditions
and link adaptation improves the served traffic and the mean
bitrate. To further investigate this power control targets have and using a more efficient link quality range where link
been scanned to find the parameter setting giving highest mean adaptation is active. The closed loop performs best at low load
bitrate as a function of served traffic at high load, f • 60%. The since it adapts to interference. However, at higher load the
results are shown in Fig. 5. The best setting was found to be: open loop algorithms perform better for cell edge users. One
reason for this is that SINR balancing costs radio network
• SNRtarget=20dB for open loop with Į = 1, capacity, as seen in Fig. 4, moving the closed loop to the left in
Fig. 5. This results in that even though the mean bitrate at
• SNRtarget = 15dB for open loop with Į = 0.7, 100% utilization is higher than with the open loop it is lower
• Effective SINRtarget = 13dB for closed loop. for the same served traffic.
The higher open loop targets are due to that interference The open loop algorithms perform equally regarding
margin must be included. This optimization is almost the same average bitrate and capacity. However, the fractional
as maximizing served traffic at full utilization (f=100%), as compensating open loop shows 20% better cell edge bitrate,
seen in Fig. 4, for open loop the later results in some dB:s see Fig. 5. The reason for this is that the fractional
higher targets. The open loop algorithms can achieve around compensation has a lower SNR target resulting in lower
20% higher capacity than the closed loop. average transmission power as shown in Fig. 6. Lower
transmission power decreases the interference which the cell
In Fig. 5 it is seen that with this parameter setting all three edge users gain from and enables a lower SNR target for the
algorithms improve both average bitrate and cell edge bitrate at same average bitrate. This is also another reason why the
the same time compared to the reference with constant power. closed loop performs worse at higher load. Higher power is
This is since the inter cell interference is reduced. Both average used when compensating for interference variations. The fully
and cell edge bitrate are improved by reduction of interference

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 100
Active Radio Link Bitrate (5th perc and mean) [Mbps]

0.45 No PC
OL PC SNRtar get :20dB α :1 90
0.4 OL PC SNRtar get :15dB α :0.7 80
0.35 CL PC SINRtarget:13dB
70 No PC
0.3 OL PC SNRtarget:20dB α :1
60

C.D.F. [%]
OL PC SNRtarget:15dB α :0.7
0.25
50 CL PC SINRtarget:13dB

0.2 40

0.15 30

0.1 20

0.05 10

0 0
0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25
Served Traffic [Mbps] Power [W]

Figure 7. Mean (circles) and cell-edge (triangles) bitrate vs served traffic. Figure 8. Transmission power distribution. 0.2MHz & f=100%.
0.2MHz.

compensating open loop is between the closed loop and the
fractional compensating open loop.
C. Results for 0.2MHz Bandwidth
The 10MHz examples above model a high data rate service
with data to fill all the 50 resource blocks. For lower data rates
fewer resource blocks per TTI will be scheduled. Also, when
there are more users for the scheduler to select among there are
scheduling principles that share the resource blocks in
frequency domain rather than in time domain. It is therefore of
interest to see the performance also for narrowband scheduling.
In Fig. 7 the results are shown for single resource block
scheduling per TTI that is 0.2MHz bandwidth. The same
parameter settings as in section B that optimized mean bitrate
for 10MHz are used.
The 0.2MHz results in Fig. 7 show a similar relationship
between the algorithms as the 10MHz results in Fig. 5 but with
more emphasis. This is since with the maximum power of
250mW the power spectrum density increases with decreased
bandwidth resulting in higher interference levels and larger
impact of power control. This is also reflected in the power
distributions in Fig. 8. Comparing with the power distributions
in Fig. 6 for 10MHz one can see that there as expected is a
smaller fraction of mobiles that are power limited with
0.2MHz. The closed loop still results in a large fraction of
power limited mobiles resulting in a much higher interference
level which clearly hits the cell edge users as seen in Fig. 7.
Again the fractional path loss compensation performs best at
high load.
V.
The uplink power control in LTE is flexible, simple and
robust. It consists of a closed loop component operating around
a reference obtained by parameterized open loop. It enables a
variety of implementations with different objectives supporting
different deployment scenarios and services. The network
control rate of the terminal can be from a simple open loop
only solution to a fast one millisecond closed loop control.
A capacity improving feature is the fractional path loss
compensation of the open loop. It enables a trade-off between
cell edge bitrate and cell capacity. It has clear advantages
compared to traditional full compensation open or closed loop.
Simulation results indicate that the fractional compensation
can:
• improve the cell-edge bitrate with up to 20% for a given
average bitrate
• improve the average bitrate with up to 20% for a given
cell-edge bitrate
• improve the capacity with up to 20%
at the same time the power consumption is reduced. The
fractional compensation is configurable with a simple
broadcast factor Į used by the UE in the open loop algorithm.
In comparison, a traditional fast SINR balancing closed
loop mechanism, which is possible to realize with the LTE
power control frame work, performs best at low load but
poorly at high load since it does not utilize the link adaptation
and the full link performance range of LTE.
REFERENCES
[1] 3GPP “E-UTRA Physical layer procedures”, TS 36.213 V8.1.0
[2] J.F. Whitehead, “Signal-Level-Based Dynamic Power Control for Co-
channel Interference Management”, VTC 1993.
[3] 3GPP, R1-074850, “Uplink Power Control for E-UTRA – Range and
Representation of P0”, Ericsson.
CONCLUSIONS
[4] 3GPP, “Physical Layer Aspects for Evolved UTRA “, TR 25.814,
V7.0.0.
[5] K. Brueninghaus et al., “Link Performance Models for System Level
Simulations of Broadband Radio Access Systems”, in proceedings of
IEEE PIMRC 2005.

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