Evaluation of the soft handover benefits on CDMA systems

In the last few years the soft handover concept has been introduced in CDMA systems with the intention to improve the quality of service of mobile communication. In this respect, there is no clear definition on the coverage area which would be useful for macrodiversity. Some authors, propose a soft handover area ranging from 25% to 35% of the total coverage area as a practical solution. This is because soft handover introduces additional interference with respect to hard handover, and consequently an excessive macrodiversity area would be worse than hard handover. In this paper we will obtain the resultant cell capacity on both the forward and reverse links, considering different values of macrodiversity. From these results we will quantify the resultant soft handover gain with respect to hard handover to determine the most appropriate macrodiversity area.