On the effect of uplink power control on temporal retransmission diversity

Using stochastic geometry, this letter studies the retransmission performance in uplink cellular networks with fractional path-loss inversion power control (FPC). We first show that the signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) is correlated across time, which imposes temporal diversity loss in the retransmission performance. In particular, FPC with lower path-loss compensation factor decreases inter-cell interference but suffers from degraded retransmission diversity. On the other hand, full path-loss inversion achieves almost full temporal diversity (i.e., temporal SIR independence) at the expense of increased inter-cell interference. To this end, the results show that ramping-down the power upon transmission failure improves the overall coverage probability in interference-limited uplink networks. © 2012 IEEE.