A new soft handover scheme using punctured turbo codes in the wideband CDMA system

We propose a new soft handover scheme using punctured turbo codes in the wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) system. In the conventional scheme, all base stations in the soft handover transmit the same encoded bit streams. However, when differently punctured bits generated from the same mother code with a lower coding rate are transmitted at each base station, an additional coding gain resulting from the lower-rate decoder can be achieved. Differently punctured bits can be produced by changing the rate matching parameters at each base station. We can improve the soft handover performance with the proposed scheme.