Effect of soft handoff on packet transmissions in cellular CDMA downlinks

Soft handoff and packet transmission scheduling are studied for cellular CDMA downlinks. A power distribution law is developed first in order to guarantee the required signal-to-interference ratio for each connection in soft handoff. Based on this, packet transmission scheduling for integrated voice and data traffic is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed packet scheduling scheme using the derived power distribution law can significantly improve the voice connection reliability, increase the system capacity, and achieve high data packet transmission throughput.