Rateless Coded Adaptive Transmission in Cellular Networks: Role of Power Control

Adaptive transmission schemes are a key part of the radio design for 5G wireless channels. The paper studies the performance of two types of adaptive transmission schemes in cellular downlink. One is based on rateless codes with constant power and the other is fixed-rate codes in conjunction with power adaptation. Using a simple stochastic geometry model for cellular downlink, the focus is to understand the key impact of power adaptation in rateless and fixed-rate coded adaptive transmission. The performance of both rateless and fixed-rate coded adaptive transmission schemes are compared by evaluating the typical user rate and success probability achievable with the two schemes. Based on both theoretical analysis and simulation results, the paper clearly shows that rateless coding simplifies the role of power control in an adaptive transmission scheme.