Mobility based estimation of inter-BSC soft handoff characteristics in CDMA networks

CDMA is a digital wireless technology that uses a unique code to distinguish each call and enables many people to share the airwaves at the same time. One of CDMA´s advantages is soft handoff (SHO). A special case of SHO is inter-BSC SHO which is more costly to process than regular intra-BSC SHO. In this paper, we use a mobility based method to analytically estimate some important inter-BSC SHO related characteristics such as the percentage of SHOs that are inter-BSC SHO and the remote call geographic distribution. These characteristics can be used to properly size such critical network resources as sidehaul bandwidth and BSC processors in order to guarantee the success rate of inter-BSC SHO. Our results show that the inter-BSC SHO percentage increases as mobile users move faster, move longer and the BSC coverage area is smaller. It´s found out that the percentage of inter-BSC handoffs is in the range of 8% - 18% depending on the network configuration.