Power control is essential in the use of direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (CDMA) techniques. Early system-level performance analyses of a CDMA approach to wireless mobile and personal communications have assumed the ability of power control to equalize the absolute signal powers of CDMA users received at each base station. This paper studies a more practical, although analytically more complicated, uplink power control technique that uses measurements of the received signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) instead. A combination of discrete-event link simulation and analysis of the obtained SIR statistics is used to explore the previously little-known behavior of a CDMA system using SIR-based power control and to obtain performance estimates for such a system under various operating assumptions. The overall results indicate that power control based on SIR has the potential for somewhat higher system performance than power control based on absolute signal strength assumed in the early analyses.