Patent ID: 6856812

Claim:
In a system having a base station transmitter for transmitting data blocks to one or more mobile stations over a radio link, a method for determining a transmit power level at which to transmit a current block, comprising the steps of: (a) receiving a quality measurement from a mobile station indicating an average radio link quality over a given measurement interval for a previous group of blocks, wherein not all of the blocks of the previous group of blocks were necessarily transmitted at the same transmit power level; (b) determining a transmit power attenuation level for each current block of a subsequent group of blocks as a function of a minimum of a first attenuation factor and a second attenuation factor, based in part on the received quality measurement over the given measurement interval; and (c) for each current block of the subsequent group, subtracting the transmit power attenuation level from a given transmit power level used for transmitting one or more of the blocks of the previous group to determine the transmit power level for that current block.