Joint performance of cells election/reselection and soft handover in the downlink direction of 3G WCDMA systems

In this paper, the downlink soft handover gain is analysed in 3G WCDMA systems under three different cell selection (CS) schemes. Results show that the performance of the soft handover depends closely on the cell selection scheme. With the distance-based CS, the soft handover gain is overestimated; with the ideal CS, soft handover gain is underestimated.