Outage Probability Analysis in Soft Handover for 3G Wireless Networks

In soft handover process, the mobile station maintains simultaneous communication with multiple base stations near the cell boundary. This increases overhead on the radio and network resource utilization. Proper design of handover, therefore, becomes a challenging task for radio resource management in 3G wireless mobile networks. In this paper, we analyze the performance of soft handover algorithm based on pilot signal strength measurements. Outage probability is used as the performance metric. The impact of averaging window size and time to trigger on the outage probability is presented. Finally, based on the numerical results obtained via simulation, proper settings of averaging window size and time to trigger are determined for optimized handover performance for the given system parameters.