Finger replacement schemes for RAKE receivers in the soft handover region with multiple base stations

We propose and analyze new finger replacement techniques for RAKE reception in the soft handover (SHO) region with multiple base stations. The proposed schemes are basically based on the block comparison among groups of resolvable paths from different base stations and lead to the reduction of complexity while offering commensurate performance in comparison with previously proposed schemes. Relying on the newly derived analytical expressions, we investigate not only the complexity in terms of the average number of required path estimations/comparisons and the SHO overhead but the error performance of the proposed scheme over independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) fading channels as well. We also examine, via computer simulations, the effect of path unbalance/correlation as well as outdated/imperfect channel estimation and show the robustness of our proposed scheme to these practical limitations.