Soft handoff technique for downlink IP packet transmissions in cellular environments

A soft handoff scheme is very helpful to minimize the service disruption in CDMA IP wireless networks. In the conventional soft handoff scheme the downlink throughput performance decreases due to fading; this is because the base station transmits packets even in bad channel conditions. This work presents a new soft handoff scheme for the downlink IP packet transmissions where the system throughput could be efficiently improved. The proposed scheme focuses on the fact that the IP packets do not have stringent delay requirements; it aims to support the guaranteed delivery of IP packets along the network.