Effect of various threshold settings on soft handoff performance in various propagation environments

In order to benefit from the advantages of soft handoff it is important that the handoff parameters be well set. This paper analyzes the sensitivity of the soft handoff percentage to variations in the propagation environment. The sensitivity analysis is then used to design a robust handoff algorithm that reduces possible holes in coverage and excessive handoff overhead in real systems. The effects of handoff threshold settings on the mean number of active set updates and individual soft handoff statistics are also analyzed. Sectorized cells are considered, and the varied propagation parameters include the path loss exponent, the variance and cross-correlation of shadow fading signals arriving from multiple sectors of a base station and different base stations