Soft handoff algorithm with variable thresholds in CDMA cellular systems

Traffic nonuniformity degrades the performance of CDMA cellular systems. The authors present a new algorithm called the variable threshold soft handoff (VTSH) which reduces the performance degradation due to traffic nonuniformity in CDMA cellular systems. Unlike the conventional fixed handoff thresholds, the proposed algorithm allows the handoff thresholds (T ADD and T DROP) to vary dynamically according to the traffic density of each cell. This algorithm has been implemented by means of computer simulation and the results show that VTSH improves the overall CDMA system performance in terms of outage probability. The VTSH algorithm can easily be applied to CDMA cellular systems without any modification