Fade margins for soft and hard handoffs

A particularly attractive feature of CDMA wireless systems proposed in the Telecommunication Industry Association's standard IS-95 [1] is their ability to get into what is known as "soft handoff". A mobile in soft handoff maintains simultaneous radio links with multiple base-stations which enables it to make use of the best quality leg most of the time. This is believed to result in a reduction of the fade margin that is needed to provide the desired coverage in a given geographical area in the presence of log-normal shadow fading. This paper presents an analysis of fade margins for systems allowing soft handoffs (e.g. CDMA) and those where only hard handoffs are possible (e.g. FDMA, TDMA). The analysis is based on a model for hard handoffs with hysteresis and connection delay and confirms the belief that soft handoffs result in smaller fade margins.