Effects of Soft Handover Margin under various Radio propagation parameters in CDMA Cellular Networks

CDMA based cellular networks support soft handover, which makes smooth transition and enhanced communication quality. It is designer's challenge to optimize handover parameters under varied propagation environmental conditions. In this paper, we have investigated the effect of soft handover margin and characteristic parameters of the radio propagation environment on the soft handover performance. We have shown handover performance depends upon characteristic parameters-path loss exponent, standard deviation, correlation coefficient of the shadow fading, window size and soft handover margin. Simulation results have shown that dependence of handover performance on radio propagation characteristic parameters can be reduced by choosing the optimum value of soft handover margin.