Macrodiversity power control in hierarchical CDMA cellular systems

Hierarchical code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular systems, consisting of macrocells with underlying microcells, are studied. We seek power control schemes which will allow both hierarchical layers to share the same spectrum. For the reverse link, hierarchical maximal ratio combining (HMRC) is applied where each mobile station (MS) is received and coherently combined by base stations (BSs) in both layers. For the forward link, selective transmit diversity (STD) is applied where each BS provides multiple transmit paths for MSs to choose. We show that both HMRC and STD are effective in hierarchical CDMA architectures. We conclude that hierarchical architectures are a viable solution for improving CDMA cellular system capacity, and a significant performance gain can be achieved without assigning disjoint spectrum between the layers, by utilizing macrodiversity schemes such as HMRC and STD.