Soft handover overhead reduction by RAKE reception with finger reassignment

We propose and analyze in this paper a new finger assignment technique that is applicable for RAKE receivers when they operate in the soft handover (SHO) region. This scheme employs a new version of generalized selection combining (GSC). More specifically, in the SHO region, the receiver uses by default only the strongest paths from the serving base station (BS) and only when the combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) falls below a certain pre-determined threshold, the receiver uses more resolvable paths from the target BS to improve the performance. Hence, relying on some recent results on order statistics we attack the statistics of two correlated GSC stages and provide the approximate but accurate closed-form expressions for the statistics of the output SNR. By investigating the tradeoff among the error performance, the path estimation load, and the SHO overhead, we show through numerical examples that the new scheme offers commensurate performance in comparison with more complicated GSC-based diversity systems while requiring a smaller estimation load and SHO overhead.