Efficient power control in of great importance in the design of high capacity cellular radio systems. Optimum power control scheme, in the sense that it minimises the outage probability, has been fully investigated for FDMA/TDMA cellular systems. The authors propose opitmum power control and several centralised power control algorithms for CDMA cellular systems. Simulation results indicate that the optimum power control scheme outperforms the perfect average power control algorithm by～1.9dB under the IS-95 defined radio condition