CIR based soft handover for UTRA FDD uplink

This paper addresses the potential benefits of using CIR based soft handover schemes for the UTRA WCDMA uplink. The objective is to find out whether additional improvement in cellular coverage and capacity can be achieved over gain based handover methods. Capacity, outage probability, throughput, interference and active set update rate serve as the basis for comparison. The system model implements in great detail the logical channel structure of the WCDMA air interface as specified by 3GPP and takes into account non uniform traffic load conditions to conduct the study.