A major concern in a cellular mobile communication system is how to efficiently utilize the limited amount of frequencies. Various channel assignment methods and traffic sharing schemes have been proposed to improve system performance. However, these approaches suffer from complicated software and hardware requirements due to increased amount of traffic control In this paper, we propose a new method for improving system performance by controlling the powers of the set-up and voice channels of each cell site. We first show that the average number of blocked calls in a system is minimized when the traffic reates are made identical for all cell sites in a system. This result, together with the relationship between the channel powers and the service area, is used to determine the appropriate channel powers of each cell site. We also determine the upper limit on the channel power of each cell site considering co-channel interference and numerically show that the proposed method is effective in reducing the number of blocked calls without an excessive increase in the amount of system control.