Patent ID: 8606312

Claim:
A method of controlling transmission power of a base station in a cellular system, comprising: receiving a reference signal having a predetermined transmission power from at least one neighbor base station; estimating a radio environment between the base station and the neighbor base station by using the reference signal; and controlling a cell coverage of the base station to correspond with transmission power calculated based on the estimated radio environment, and wherein the estimating the radio environment comprises: obtaining a path loss between the base station and the neighbor base station from the receiving power of the reference signal; and estimating a distance between the base station and the neighbor base station from the path loss, and the controlling the cell coverage comprises: determining the transmission power using a correlation value between the reference signal transmitted from the neighbor base station and the reference signal received from the neighbor base station and setting the transmission power as a receiving power having a desired magnitude at a boundary of the controlled cell coverage in accordance with comparison of the correlation value with a threshold, where the cell coverage is variably set in accordance with the determining.