Soft handover performance of a wideband CDMA testbed system for IMT-2000

We have developed a wideband code division multiple access (CDMA) testbed for the purpose of verifying an International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000) system. The testbed has capabilities of soft handover (SHO) with an algorithm based on the received SIR. We report the performance of SHO from the results of laboratory/field experiments and computer simulations. An urban area and a suburban area were chosen for field experiments. This paper discusses the influence of SHO parameters and the propagation environment on the performance of SHO. Furthermore, we evaluated some SHO algorithms by computer simulations with propagation data measured in the field experiments of both areas.