A practical study of adaptive finger reassignment and replacement in the soft handover region

We present the effects of correlated or/and non-identical fading channels as well as outdated/imperfect channel estimations on the performance of newly proposed finger reassignment and replacement schemes for RAKE receivers in the soft handover region. The performance of these schemes were previously analyzed by the authors over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. In this paper, we consider the exponentially decaying power delay profile among paths with the exponential and constant correlation models. The effect of outdated/imperfect channel estimations is also evaluated. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes are still offering an interesting performance versus network overhead tradeoff in the practical channel environments considered in this paper.