Macrodiversity in IP based cellular networks

As cellular networks evolve into 3G and beyond, they will be designed around IP infrastructure to enable cost benefits besides better integration with the Internet. Several proposals have been made to handle fast handoffs in an IP based cellular network. All these proposals focus on the problem of routing packets in a fast and efficient manner. However, handoffs can also be used to exploit macrodiversity and increase coverage and capacity as is done in current CDMA networks via soft handoffs. We show that soft handoffs are not suitable for IP cellular networks and propose a new method to exploit macrodiversity via fast hard handoffs. Our method does not suffer the disadvantages of soft handoffs in IP cellular networks. We show through simulations that we can achieve coverage gains approaching those obtained by soft handoffs with our scheme.