Adaptive selection combining for soft handover in OVSF W-CDMA systems

In W-CDMA, soft handover is supported at cell boundaries to maintain communication quality. The maximal ratio combining (MRC) and generalized selection combining (GSC) , are two possible approaches. However, soft handover is resource-intensive. In this letter, we propose an adaptive selection combining (ASC) scheme that can switch flexibly between MRC and GSC so as to take care of both channel loading and communication quality. The signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) is kept as high as that of MRC while the blocking probability can remain at about the same level as that of GSC.