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Handoff is an essential component of mobile cellular communication systems.

Mobility causes dynamic variations in link quality and interference levels in cellular systems. This change is known as a handoff.

Hard handoff: A definite decision is made on

whether to handoff or not.

Soft handoff: A conditional decision is made on whether to hand off.

Implementing hard handoffs is potentially difficult in power-controlled code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems. IS-95 CDMA standard(the only major cellular standard) implements soft handoff as a power control & interference-reduction mechanisms.

1. To eliminate near-far effect 2. To conserve transmit power.

What is power control? Power control ensures that each user receives and transmits just enough energy to properly convey information while interfering with other users no more than necessary. Minimizing the transmitted power of a portable user unit maximizes the interval between battery charges.

A system with power control attempts to dynamically adjust transmitter powers while in operation. Power control is the main tool used in IS-95 to combat the near-far problem.

Provide a reference signal for all MSs that provides the phase reference for COHERENT demodulation. 4-6 dB stronger than all other channels Used to lock onto other channels. Contains no information except the RF carrier. Spread using the PN spreading code to identify the BS. (512 different BS*64 offsets).

Using thresholds:

connection.

1. Add threshold for adding a new

2. Drop threshold for deleting a connection 3. Timer

(i.e. if signal goes below threshold and stays there for some specified time)

Active set: The set of base stations with which a user is

communicating at any given time. IS-95 allows up to six pilots in the active set, with two pilots sharing one RAKE finger. Candidate set: This set contains the pilots that are not currently in the active set. However, these pilots have been received with sufficient signal strength to indicate that the associated forward traffic channels could be successfully demodulated. Maximum size of the candidate set is six pilots. Neighbour set: This set contains neighbour pilots that are not currently in the active or the candidate set and are likely candidates for handoff. Neighbours of a pilot are all the sectors/ cells that are in its close vicinity. The initial neighbour list is sent to the mobile in the System Parameter message on the paging channel. The maximum size of the neighbour set is 20. Remaining set: This set contains all possible pilots in the current system, excluding pilots in the active, candidate, or neighbour sets.

There are four handoff parameters. T_ADD, T_COMP, and T_DROP relate to the measurement of pilot and T_TDROP is a timer.

Add Threshold (T_ADD): Any pilot that is strong

but is not in the HDM is a source of interference. This pilot must be immediately moved to the active set for handoff to avoid voice degradation or a possible dropped call. T_ADD affects the percentage of mobiles in handoff. It should be low enough to quickly add useful pilots and high enough to avoid false alarms due to noise.

Comparison Threshold (T_COMP): It has effect on

handoff percentage similar to T_ADD. It should be low for faster handoff and should be high to avoid false alarms. Drop Threshold (T_DROP): It affects the percentage of mobiles in handoff. It should be low enough to avoid dropping a good pilot that goes into a short fade. It should be high enough not to quickly remove useful pilots in the active or candidate set. The value of T_DROP should be carefully selected by considering the values of T_ADD and T_TDROP.

Drop Timer Threshold (T_TDROP): It should

be greater than the time required to establish handoff. T_TDROP should be small enough not to quickly remove useful pilots. A large value of T_TDROP may be used to force a mobile to continue in soft handoff in a weak coverage area.

Soft handoff reduces/eliminates the ping-pong effect common in hard handoff. This results in: - Less load on the network from handoff signalling and overhead. - Smoother user communications without the clicks typical of hard handoff when speech transmissions are stopped momentarily during handoffs.
With soft handoff, there is no hysteresis margin, resulting in less delay and equivalent to instantaneous macroscopic selection diversity. This is accomplished by instantaneous switching to the best base station signal during a soft handoff (uplink), and avoids the additional interference associated with handoffs with hysteresis.

Hence: Keeping base station separations and (base station and user) transmitter powers fixed, the overall uplink interference is reduced, leading to: a) better communication quality for a given number of users. b) more users (i.e., greater capacity) for the same required Ec/I0 (ratio of received
received spectral density). c) smaller required uplink transmitter powers, further reducing uplink interference. Keeping required outage probability and base station separation fixed, the system fade margins are reduced. This leads to smaller required downlink transmitter powers and downlink interference. Keeping the same required outage probability and fade margins, base station separations increase. Soft handoff imposes fewer time constraints on the network. There is a longer mean queuing time to get a new channel from the target base station, so this helps reduce blocking probability or probability of dropped calls.

energy per chip to total

Needs extra modems - typically 30% to 50% of calls may be in soft handoff at any time. Additional network resources are used during a soft handoff. These resources thus become unavailable for use elsewhere. Soft handoff is more complex. Downlink interference (to other users) increases when soft handoff is in progress, since several base stations are transmitting what would otherwise be transmitted by one base station. This can add to the uplink interference too, if the same frequency is used for uplink as for downlink. The interference increasing effect should normally be slight, if it is assumed that only a small fraction of the duration of a typical call is spent in soft handoff.

Soft handoff is an intriguing technology. It promises better performance than hard

handoff. Because of the complexity of soft handoff, another main area of research on soft handoff is on the different trade-offs involved in the handoff parameter settings. The quantitative trade-offs between the various advantages and disadvantages of soft handoff need to be further investigated, as do the parameter settings.