This paper proposes a measurement scheme of instantaneous signal-to-average interference plus background noise ratio (SIR) for SIR-based fast transmit power control (TPC) using time-multiplexed pilot symbols on the reverse link of DS-CDMA mobile radio. Both pilot and data are used for signal power measurement, but pilot symbols are used for measurement of average interference plus noise power. By the means of computer simulation, the TPC parameters, i. e. , SIR measurement period and step size, are optimized to maximize the link capacity in a Rayleigh fading environment. The capacity of the power controlled reverse link with channel coding and Rake combining is evaluated to understand the effects of the number of resolvable propagation paths, fading maximum Doppler frequency(or mobile traveling speed), and antenna diversity reception in single-cell and multi-cell environments.