Performance of power-triggered and Ec/N0-triggered soft handover algorithms for UTRA

A dynamic adding and dropping thresholds based soft handover algorithm proposed for the UTRA system is evaluated through simulations. The simulations are carried out in an UMTS vehicular environment. Two possible handover triggering schemes i.e. received signal power and received Ec/N0, are compared under the propagation conditions, mobility behaviour and various cell loads. The handover performances are observed in terms of the system resource efficiency including mean active set number and active set update rate and quality of service such as call outage probability and call blocking probability