Overview of Power Estimation Methods in Mobile Communications

This is a survey paper. In this paper various methods used for power estimation in wireless communications have been discussed. Wireless communications has become an inseparable part of our life. Power consumption is one of the major factors that decide the communication system quality. Accurate power estimation has an important role for power control and handoff decisions in mobile communications. Window based weighed sample average power estimators are commonly used due to their simplicity. In practice, the performances of these estimators degrade severely when the estimators are used in the presence of correlated samples. In this paper performances of the local mean power estimators namely, sample average, optimum unbiased and maximum likelihood estimators and Kalman Filter are analyzed in the presence of correlated samples. The variance of the estimators is used as performance measures.