Power Control in GSM Power control (PC) refers to strategies or techniques required to adjust the transmitted power.

Power control regulates the transmitted power to achieve the desired signal strength. A mobile far away from a base station requires a stronger transmitted signal than a mobile close to a base station. If the speech quality is better than necessary for one mobile the signal strength for that mobile will be decreased. This implies that the system will be improved, because of the reduction in interference (disturbance). The single mobile will also experience a decrease in battery consumption when transmitting to the base station. This is the main idea with power control. Power control is used both in uplink and in down link between base station and mobile. RF power control will be used in the GSM MS and BS to reduce the transmit power to the minimum required to achieve the minimum quality objective and hence reduce the level of co channel interference The MS will be capable of varying its transmit power form its maximum output down to 20mW in steps of nominally 2 dB The BS calculates the RF Power level to be used by the MS and sends a 4 bit number instruction to the corresponding MS