  Power control is a fundamental task accomplished in any wireless cellular
network; its aim is to set the transmit power of any mobile terminal, so that
each user is able to achieve its own target SINR. While conventional power
control algorithms require knowledge of a number of parameters of the signal of
interest and of the multiaccess interference, in this paper it is shown that in
a large CDMA system much of this information can be dispensed with, and
effective distributed power control algorithms may be implemented with very
little information on the user of interest. An uplink CDMA system subject to
flat fading is considered with a focus on the cases in which a linear MMSE
receiver and a non-linear MMSE serial interference cancellation receiver are
adopted; for the latter case new formulas are also given for the system SINR in
the large system asymptote. Experimental results show an excellent agreement
between the performance and the power profile of the proposed distributed
algorithms and that of conventional ones that require much greater prior
knowledge.
