The process of controlling the power of a transmitter to achieve better communication of a signal is called power control. Power control helps in improving overall quality of the service. Power control is mainly used to control transmitting power of the communication device to achieve better performance.
Power control is implemented using standard algorithms. Power control is implemented on various communication devices such as wireless routers, cell phones, sensor networks, etc.
Power control allows the transmitting signal power to be scaled to improve better signal quality.
Power control algorithms designed not to scale the power unnecessarily high. These algorithms help to maintain the balance between low, high and average transmission powers for optimal signal.
Power control helps with several functionalities:
- Interference management: Due to the broadcast nature of wireless communication, signals interfere with each other. Power control (PC) helps to ensure spectral reuse and a desirable user experience.
- Energy management: Due to the limited battery power energy conservation is important for the lifetime of the nodes and the network. Power control helps to minimize the overall key component of the overall energy expenditure.
- Connectivity management: Power control helps a logical connectivity for a given signal processing scheme.
Reasons for Power Control
- While propagating the wireless channels, the strength of the electromagnetic waves is affected by pathloss and shadow fading, resulting the reduction of the strength of the signal at the receiving end.
- Higher transmitting power helps to reduce packet loss and false block rate and improve transmission reliability, helps to apply high order MCS and improve spectral efficiency. But high transmit power can cause interference and consume high battery power.
So power control is needed to increase power based to compensate path-loss and shadow fading. Power Control also helps to maintain the quality of the received signal while suppressing interference between other cells.
Power control in wireless networks has been systematically studied since 1970s.
