Combined power control and error-control coding in multicarrier DS-CDMA systems

We propose truncating the transmission power (allocating no power) for symbols with low channel gain, and tagging erasures on the corresponding symbols at the receiver. The motivation is that symbols with low channel gain are highly likely to be in error and yet, if transmitted, consume the energy resource and generate interference to other users. Truncating the power for those symbols has the effect of reducing the interference to other users and allocating more power on symbols with high channel gain (thereby reducing the error probability). Since block codes can correct twice as many erasures as errors, the coded performance can be improved by properly combining the power control with the error-control coding. In this letter, we analyze the performance of the Reed-Solomon-coded multicarrier direct- sequence code-division multiple-access systems with two power-control schemes. We show that the probability of incorrect decoding can be significantly improved by properly combining the power control with the error-control coding.