The efficient management of wireless resource is essential to the success of wireless systems. While power control is traditionally considered as a means to counteract the detrimental effects of channel fading, it is also a flexible mechanism to provide Quality of Service to individual users, and can be used as a platform for radio resource management. In this paper, we review the developments of distributed power control and related resource management problems in cellular wireless systems. We highlight the feasibility issue in a power-controlled system, which enables us to push the system toward high efficiency, and prevent the system from collapsing at the same time.Considering the unique features of multimedia traffic to be supported in future wireless systems, we also review power and rate control schemes proposed for wireless data, and present a framework for utility-based power control as a possible candidate for distributed power control of multimedia wireless systems.