Adaptive rake combining in the soft handover region

We propose and analyze new finger assignment schemes which are applicable for RAKE reception in the soft handover region. These schemes rely on variants of the conventional generalized selection combining (GSC) and the minimum selection GSC schemes in order to choose an acceptable base station and its corresponding paths. Relying on some recently derived results on order statistics, we investigate the average error rate performance as well as the average number of estimated and combined paths of the proposed schemes over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. The mathematical formalism is illustrated with few selected numerical results that show the tradeoff between performance and processing power consumption.