Uplink Closed Loop Power Control for LTE System

Performance evaluation with the open loop error, TPC command delay and power headroom reporting
Bilal Muhammad
1
, Abbas Mohammed
2
COMSATS Institute of IT, Abbottabad Campus, Pakistan
1

Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
2
bilal212@gmail.com


AbstractThe role of uplink power control is to suppress
interference. Power control refers to set output power levels of
transmitters, base stations in the downlink and User Equipment
(UE) in the uplink. In this paper the performance of 3GPP Long
Term Evolution (LTE) closed loop power control combined with
fractional path loss compensation factor is evaluated by
simulating the effects of open loop error, Transmit Power
Control (TPC) command delay and power headroom reporting.
Simulation results show that the closed loop power control with
fractional path loss compensation factor is advantageous
compared to closed loop power control with full path loss
compensation. The closed loop power control with fractional
path loss compensation factor is found to improve the system
performance in terms of mean bit rate by 63%.
Keywords-LTE; power control; power headroom report; TPC
I. INTRODUCTION
Uplink transmitter power control is a key radio resource
management feature in cellular communication systems. It is
usually used to provide an adequate transmit power to the
desired signals to achieve the necessary quality, minimizing
interference to other users in the system and maximizing the
battery life of the mobile terminal. In order to achieve these
goals, uplink power control has to adapt to the radio
propagation channel conditions, including path loss,
shadowing and fast fading fluctuations, while limiting the
interference effects from other users, within the cell and from
neighboring cells.

The closed loop power control combined with fractional path
loss compensation factor sets the SINR target based on the
path loss of the users while the conventional closed loop uses
a single SINR target for all the users in a cell. The
performance evaluation of the LTE closed loop power control
combined with fractional path loss compensation factor for the
Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH) [1] is evaluated
and an optimal value of 0.8 for the path loss compensation
factor is proposed in [2]. This paper extends the work carried
out in [2] by evaluating the performance with the open loop
error, TPC command delay and power headroom reporting.

The paper is outlined as follows. In Section II power control is
discussed in general it also presents E-URTA power control
formula for the PUSCH. In Section III the modeling of
realistic scenario which includes open loop error, TPC
command delay and power headroom reporting is presented.
In Section IV the simulation assumptions are outlined. The
simulations results are described in Section V followed by
conclusions in Section VI.
II. POWER CONTROL
LTE uses single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-
FDMA) as its radio access technology in the uplink. Usage of an
orthogonal transmission scheme eliminates intra-cell
interference; however, the system performance is still limited by
the inter-cell interference.

In order to maximize the spectral efficiency, 3GPP LTE is
designed for frequency reuse 1 [1] both for downlink and
uplink, which means that all cells in the network use the same
frequency bands. Thus with frequency reuse 1 [1], both data
and control channels are sensitive to inter-cell interference.
The cell edge performance and the capacity of a cell site can
be limited by the inter-cell interference. Therefore the role of
closed loop power control becomes decisive to provide the
required SINR to maintain an acceptable level of
communication between the eNB and the UE while at the
same time controlling interference caused to neighboring cells.

Battery power is a scarce resource for portable devices such as
notebooks, ultra-portables, gaming devices and video cameras.
In the coming years these devices will operate over mobile
broadband technology such as LTE. Therefore to minimize
consumption of battery power and use the available power
efficiently, power control can be helpful.

The 3GPP specifications [1] defines the setting of the UE
transmit power for PUSCH by the following equation

max 10 0 min{ ,10 log ( )} PUSCH mcs i P P M P PL f o o = + + + + A (1)
where
- P
max
is the maximum allowed transmit power.
- M is the number of physical resource blocks (PRB).
- P
0
is cell/UE specific parameter. It is used to control
SNR target and is signaled by the radio resource control
(RRC). In this paper, it is assumed that P
0
is cell-specific.
- o is the path loss compensation factor. It is a 3-bit cell
specific parameter in the range [0-1] signaled by RRC.
- PL is the downlink path loss estimate. It is calculated in
the UE based on the reference symbol received power
(RSRP).
- o
mcs
is cell/UE specific modulation and coding scheme
defined in the 3GPP specifications for LTE.
978-1-4244-8058-6/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE
2010 6th International Conference on Emerging Technologies (ICET)
88

- f (
i
) is UE specific. i A is a closed loop correction
value and f is a function that permits to use accumulate or
absolute correction value.

In this paper, accumulate [1] correction value is considered to
correct the UE uplink power.

The accumulate correction value is calculated as

| | ( ) ( 1) ( ) dB
PUSCH PUSCH
f i f i i K o = +

(2)
where
PUSCH
is UE specific correction value, which is also
referred as TPC command. TPC commands [-1, 0, 1, 3] dB are
used during the simulations. f (0) = 0 and K
PUSCH
= 4
TTIs.

The parameter P
0
is calculated [3] as

0 0 max 10 0 ( ) (1 )( 10 log ) [dBm] n P SNR P P M o o = + +

(3)
where,
SNR
0
is the open loop target SNR (signal-to-noise ratio)
P
n
is the noise power per PRB.
M
0
defines the number of PRBs for which the SNR target is
reached with full power. It is set to 1 for simplicity.
The LTE closed loop power control mechanism operates
around open loop point of operation. The UE adjusts its uplink
transmission power based on the TPC commands it receives
from the eNB when the uplink power setting is performed at
the UE using open loop power control.

Therefore, eq. (1) can be re-written as


max min{ , ( )} [dBm] PUSCH OL i P P P f = + A

(4)
Where P
OL
is the uplink transmit power set by the open loop
point of operation and is given by

| | max, 10 0 min{ 10 log } dBm OL P P M P PL o = + +

(5)

It is worthwhile to note that, if P
PUSCH
is set using the closed
loop power control then power limitation is neglected in
eq. (5) and is applied by eq.(4).
III. MODELLING OF REALISTIC SCENARIOS
A. Power headroom reporting Model
Power headroom (P
h
) is a mechanism by which the mobile
terminal is configured to provide regular reports on its power
to the network. The power headroom report can be used by the
eNB to calculate the path loss of the users which is then used
in setting of SINR target.

Power headroom report is sent by the UE to the eNB which
indicates how much power the UE is left with to start using
full power. In other words, it is the difference between the UE
transmit power and the maximum UE transmit power and is
given by:


| | max dBm h PUSCH P P P =

(6)


The following triggers [4] should apply to the power
headroom reporting:
The path loss has changed by a threshold value, since the
last power headroom report is sent. The threshold value
can be [1, 3, 6, inf] dB.
The time elapsed from previous power headroom report is
more than [10, 20, 50, 200, 1000, inf] TTIs.

The equation for setting of SINR targets based on the path loss
presented in [2] is given by
max max
max
( 1) ( ) SINRtarge ,
SINRtarget [dB]
SINRtarget ,
PL PL t PL PL
PL PL
o + <
' =

>

(7)

As the power headroom reporting is taken in to account, now, in
order to set the SINR target based on the path loss, the PL is
calculated [2] as:

| |
10 0
1
dB
{ 10 log ( )} h i
PL
P M P f o
=
A


(8)



where P
h
= P
PUSCH
= P
max
when PL = PL
max
.

B. Open loop Error Model

The open loop power control errors are usually the result of
several factors such as the accuracy of measurements of
reference symbol received power (RSRP) at the UE and
inaccuracies in the radio parts such as temperature sensitivity
and tolerances in the standard. The open loop error is identified
as a slowly varying component and varies between manufactures
of UEs. The sources of open loop power control error are
illustrated in Fig. 1.
Fig 1: Illustration of the sources of the open loop error
89

Since the LTE RF components are the same as that used in
WCDMA, the tolerance described in the technical specification
[5] can be used for first approximation.
Tolerance of + 9 dB is required, however a batch of UEs can
handle + 4 dB. Thus, the absolute value of + 4dB with a uniform
distribution is considered as an open loop error in order to
evaluate the effect of the closed loop power correction using TPC
commands.
By taking the absolute open loop error into account, the
expression for calculating UE uplink power using closed loop is
given by:
| | max min{ , ( )} dBm PUSCH OL i P P P abserr f = + + A

(9)


where abserr is the absolute open loop error.

C. TPC command delay Model
The eNodeB issues the TPC command to adjust the power at the
UE. However, the adjustment takes place after some delay. This
delay is typically the propagation round trip time (RTT) and the
processing time at the UE and the eNB. The RTT delay is due to
the wave propagation, while the processing delay at the eNodeB
occurs due to measuring the received SINR and issue of TPC
command based on SINR target and received SINR. The
processing delay at the UE occurs due to measuring the RSRP,
calculating the PL, calculating the transmit power and applying
the adjustment based on the received TPC command. The total
time delay used during simulations is K
PUSCH
= 4 TTIs [1].

IV. SIMULATION ASSUMPTIONS AND MODEL
Dynamic simulations have been used. The terminals having
the velocity of 3 km/h 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. The simulator used the ray-
based 3GPP Spatial Channel Model Extension (SCME) [5] to
model the multipath fading propagation in the system. The
simulation parameters are listed in Table 1.

Table 1: Default simulation parameter

The LTE closed loop power control operates around open loop
point of operation, thus the simulator sets the open loop power
control based on the SINR target the power is corrected using
TPC commands which are issue based on the difference
between SINR target and estimated received SINR. Based on
transmit power, channel realizations, modulation scheme, and
the active interferers, an SINR is calculated for each link and
antenna including both intra- and inter-cell interference.

In contrast to full buffer traffic model a simple upload traffic
model is used. In full buffer model, neither a user leaves due
to hang up, nor does a new user arrives, since each user buffer
is filled with infinite data, and the user will not leave until and
unless it transmits all the data.

The simple upload traffic model is designed in a way such that
the users can have limited data in their buffers, thus a user
leaves when it transmits the data and new users are added in
the system. It provides the ease to define the user upload file
size and mean bearer bit rate. The mean bearer bit rate along
with the offered cell throughput defines the total number of
users in the system. Moreover, the simple upload buffer model
also allows inclusion the effect of queuing delay when
calculating the user bit rate. The queuing delay reflects more
realistic results and provides a better scale for performance
comparison in choosing the optimal value of o. For different
values of o, the 5
th
percentile and mean user throughput is
calculated by taking the effect of queuing delay into account.

V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section we present the simulation results using the
simple upload traffic model. Each value of o is investigated for
each closed loop SINR target from a set of SINR targets. The
Traffic Models
User distribution Uniform
Terminal speed 3 km/h, 120 km/h
Data generation Simple upload traffic model
Radio Network Models
Distance
attenuation
L = 35.3+37.6*log(d), d = distance in meters
Shadow fading Log-normal, 8dB standard deviation
Multipath fading SCM, Suburban macro
Cell layout Hexagonal grid, 3-sector sites, 21 sectors in total
Cell radius 167m (500m inter-site distance)
System Models
Spectrum
allocation
10MHz (50 resource blocks) 180kHz (1 resource
block)
Max UE output
power
250mW into antenna
Max antenna gain 15dBi
Modulation and
coding schemes
QPSK and 16QAM, turbo coding
Scheduling
algorithm
Round robin
Receiver MMSE [6] with 2-branch receive diversity
90

criterion that selects optimal value of o for a given SINR
target is optimized for cell-edge bit rate i.e. that value of o has
been chosen which gives the best CELL edge performance for
a given SINR target.
A. Performance analysis with the power headroom report
In this section, the behavior of the closed loop power control
with the power headroom reports is analyzed. The results
involve the individual effect of both the triggers applicable to
the power headroom reporting namely periodicity and path loss
change. The performance comparison of both the triggers is
also analyzed.
a) Triggering at the periodic periodic intervals
The performance comparison in terms of user bit rate of the
closed loop power control with full compensation and o = 0.8
with or without the power headroom report is shown in Fig. 2. It
can be seen from the figure with the power headroom reports the
user bit rate is degraded for the users with good radio conditions.
The reason for this degradation in the mean bit rate is due to the
fact that the SINR target setting is based on the outdated path
loss. The SINR target setting based on the path loss aims to
improve performance, in terms of bit rate, for the users with
good radio conditions. Thus, the more outdated the path loss the
more will be the degradation in the mean bit rate, as can be seen
in Fig. 2 for high periodicity values. It is worthwhile to note that,
for a longer simulation time and setting the power headroom
periodicity to infinity, the performance of the SINR target setting
based on the path loss will be more like that of the absolute
setting of the SINR target.
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
User Bit rate [Mbps]
Performance analysis with Phr report triggering at periodic intervals
o: 1, Ideal
o: 0.8, Ideal
o: 0.8, periodicity: 50 ms
o: 0.8, periodicity: 100 ms
o: 0.8, periodicity: 200 ms

Fig 2: CDF plot of the user bit rate. The power headroom report
triggering after 50, 100 and 200 TTIs.
b) Triggering at change in the path loss
The simulation time is too short and mobiles speed of 3 km/h is
too slow for the UE's to experience a change in the path loss by 3
dB. In order to analyze the behavior using the path loss change as
the power headroom trigger, the mobiles speed is increased from
3 km/h to 120 km/hr and the path loss threshold is set to 1 dB,
while the simulation time is kept the same.
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
Performance anaylsis of Phr report triggering at change in PL
User bit rate [Mbps]
o: 1, Ideal
o: 0.8, Ideal
o: 0.8, perodicity 200 ms
o: 0.8, plth: 1 dB
Fig 3: CDF plot of the user bit rate showing the performance of the power
headroom report. The mobile speed is 120 km/h. The simulation time is
200 ms.
The power headroom report triggering at change in the path loss
results in better performance than triggering at periodic
intervals, it can be seen in Fig. 3, the mean bit rate is more
degraded using the periodicity trigger than using the path loss
threshold trigger. The reason for more degradation using
periodicity trigger is that the power headroom report triggers at
periodic intervals, if any change in the UE uplink power occurs
right after periodic interval the UE have to wait for next interval
to report the new uplink power. Thus the longer the periodic
interval the longer the UE has to wait to send power headroom
update.
On the other hand, triggering power headroom report when path
loss changes by a threshold value the uplink power is reported
immediately meaning that eNB has more updated estimate of the
UE path loss leading to better performance in terms of mean bit
rate. In this specific scenario, power headroom is reported only
once using periodic intervals but on the other hand the power
headroom was sent whenever the UE experienced path loss
change of 1 dB.
c) Performance comparison of both the triggers

Fig. 4 shows the performance of the power headroom report
triggering either at the periodic intervals or when UE
experiences 1 dB change in path loss and also the combination
of both the triggers. It can be seen that the power headroom
report triggering at change in path loss alone results in the
same performance when compared to power headroom report
triggering at periodic intervals or using both of the triggers.

However, the reporting overhead will be more in case of
triggering at change in path loss than that of periodic
triggering. Thus its a tradeoff between reporting overhead and
mean bit rate.
91

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
User bit rate [Mbps]
Peformance comparasion of power headroom triggers
o: 1
o: 0.8
o: 0.8,periodicty: 50 TTIs
o: 0.8,periodicty: 50 TTIs , plth: 1dB
o: 0.8, plth: 1dB
Fig 4: Performance comparison of the power headroom triggers.

B. Performance analysis with the open loop error and TPC
command delay
In here, the individual and combined effects of both the open
loop error and TPC command delay are investigated. Fig. 5
shows that the performance of the user bit rate is improved for
the users with good radio conditions when taking the open loop
error in to account. This is because of the increase of the uplink
power owing to the open loop error for the number of UE
which results in high received SINR. The performance in terms
of user bit rate is slightly degraded for users in the low CDF
region since the number of UE cannot satisfy the required
SINR due to open loop error. However, the performance
change in terms of bit rate due to absolute error is just the
initial phenomenon at the start of simulations (i.e., short
simulation time), and will not be visible when simulated for
longer time since the closed loop power control compensates,
for the open loop error, using the TPC commands.

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
User Bit rate [Mbps]
Performance analysis with absolute error in power setting
o: 0.8, Ideal
o: 0.8, abserr

Fig 5: Performance analysis of the user bit rate when only the absolute
error is taken into account.

The TPC delay introduces an initial delay of only 4 TTIs
before the UE starts to use the TPC command it received from
the eNB to correct its uplink power. It is worth noting that with
the round robin scheduling, it takes only 14 TTIs before all
users start to correct their uplink power using the TPC
command. Thus, the effect of TPC command delay is not
visible as can be seen in Fig. 6, where the closed loop power
control with TPC command delay shows the same performance
in terms of cell-edge and mean bit rate as that of the closed
loop without TPC command delay.

0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
User Bit rate [Mbps]
Performance analysis with the TPC delay
o: 0.8
o: 0.8, TPC delay

Fig 6: CDF plot of the user bit rate showing both the closed loop power
control with or without TPC delay.

Finally, Fig. 7 shows the combined effect of both the open loop
error and the TPC command delay. However, since there is no
noticeable effect of the TPC command delay as discussed
above, it can be concluded that the effect on the user bit rate
shown is due to the open loop error only. It is also evident from
the fact that the results in this figure show similar trend to those
in Fig. 5.
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
User bit rate [Mbps]
Performance analysis with the abserr and TPC delay
o: 0.8, Ideal
o: 0.8, abserr and TPC delay

Fig 7: Performance analysis of the user bit rate with both the absolute
error and TPC delay are taken into account.

C. Performance analysis with power headroom report, open
loop error and TPC command delay

It is worthwhile to note that the terminal speed is increased to
120 km/h just to analyze the behavior of the power headroom
report triggering at change in path loss. In order to simulate
the combined effect of the realistic scenario the mobile speed
is kept at 3 km/h while the path loss threshold of 3 dB is used.

Fig. 8 shows the performance in terms of user bit rate when
taking into account the combined effects of the absolute error,
time delay, and power headroom report triggering at periodic
92

intervals of 200 ms and/or change in path loss by 3 dB. It can
be seen from this figure that the closed loop power control
using o = 0.8 shows performance gain in both mean and cell-
edge bit rate. The mean bit rate is improved by 63% and at the
same time providing better cell-edge performance compared to
o = 1.
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
C
.
D
.
F
.


[
%
]
User bit rate [Mbps]
Performance analysis of Closed loop Power control Schemes
o: 1, Ideal
o: 0.8, Ideal
o: 0.8, Realisttic

Fig 8: Performance analysis in terms of the user bit rate taking in to
account the power headroom report, absolute error, and time delay.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper the performance of closed loop power control
combined with fractional path loss compensation factor is
evaluated by simulating the effects of open loop error, TPC
command delay, and power headroom reporting.
The results shown that the performance of the closed loop
power control using o = 0.8 with the power headroom report
triggering at periodic intervals and change in path loss of the
UE. It was found that with the use of power headroom report
the performance was degraded in the mean bit rate due to the
outdated path loss used in the setting of SINR target. However,
this performance in terms of the mean bit rate is still greater
than the performance of the closed loop power control with the
full compensation.
The TPC command delay and open loop error did not affect the
performance of closed loop power control using o = 0.8.
In the realistic case, the performance in terms of mean bit rate
was improved by 63 % for a given SINR target. This shows the
performance of the closed loop power control combined with
the fractional path loss compensation factor is advantageous
than the closed loop power control with full compensation.
REFERENCES
[1] 3GPP E-UTRA Physical layer procedures, TS 36.213 V8.1.0
[2] Bilal Muhammad, Abbas Mohammed. Performance Evaluation of
Uplink Closed Loop Power Control for LTE System in proceedings of
IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference 2009 Fall (VTC09-Fall), 20-23
September 2009.
[3] R1-074850 Uplink Power Control for E-UTRA Range and
Representation of P0.
[4] R4-081162 LS on power headroom reporting.
[5] D. Baum et.al. An Interim Channel Model for 4G Systems, Extending
the 3GPP Spatial Channel Model (SCM) in proceedings of IEEE
Vehicular Technology Conference 2005 Spring (VTC05-Spring), May
2005
[6] J. H. Winters, Optimum Combining in Digital Mobile Radio with Co-
channel Interference, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in
Communications, Vol. SAC-2, No. 4, July 1984.
93