VCB by means of soft2hard handover in WCDMA

In the third generation of wireless systems, WCDMA is to be the access method in the FDD mode. Therefore, the capacity of the system is based on the cross correlation among the user´s allocated scrambling codes. In this work, we discuss and use virtual channel borrowing algorithm (VCB) to improve the performance of resource sharing in the third generation mobile system. We exploit the overlapping region among the cells to achieve a balanced distribution of traffic load while reducing call blocks and handover failures. We achieve that by forcing users to reduce their connections to one active cell only in the overlapping region and when they are in soft handover state.