Effect of soft handoffs on the signaling traffic in IMT-2000 networks

Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a promising candidate for radio transmission technologies in future mobile communication systems, such as International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-2000. As a unique feature of CDMA systems, soft handoff can increase the system capacity but it may also increase the signaling traffic. This paper investigates the effect of soft handoffs on the signaling traffic in IMT-2000 networks in terms of processing load at each physical entity (PE) and signaling load at each signaling link. Compared with hard handoffs, soft handoffs require more processing, especially at the access network and slightly increase signaling load.