A Practical Study of Finger Assignment Schemes in the Soft Handover Region with Multiple Base Stations

We present the effects of correlated or/and non-identical fading channels as well as outdated/imperfect channel estimations on the performance of newly proposed finger assignment schemes for RAKE receivers in the soft handover region.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 (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels. In this paper, we consider an exponentially decaying power delay profile among paths along with an exponential correlation among these paths. The effect of outdated/imperfect channel estimations is also evaluated. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes are still applicable to non-i.i.d. fading channels and are offering some interesting performance gains in the practical channel environments considered in this paper.