Self-Optimization of RACH Power Considering Multi-Cell Outage in 3GPP LTE Systems

Self-organizing network (SON), which is an essential technology of future radio networks, is proposed in the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) specification as a usage case. In this paper, we focus on user equipment (UE)'s power control considering interference mitigation and retransmission constraints especially for physical random access channel (PRACH) of LTE. When a UE initially accesses an evolved-NodeB (eNB), it sends a preamble with an initial access level, and raises the power by a fixed step whenever the preamble was not detected by the eNB. We present an analysis and simulation to study the tradeoff relationship between inter-cell interference and retransmission according to the PRACH power setting, i.e., the initial target received power and power ramping step, assuming Rayleigh fading channels. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm tracing the optimal power setting that minimizes the resource wastage of the cell in consideration and its adjacent cells satisfying the constraint of retransmission and failure probability bound.